The shooting to death of two human rights activists campaigning against police killings just hours after the government called them a front for a crime gang left Kenya shocked and convulsed today.
"These two were well-known within the human rights community. Nothing warrants their deaths," said Florence Jaoko, head of state-funded Kenya National Commission on Human Rights.
Unidentified gunmen killed Oscar Foundation director Kamau Kingara and programmes coordinator Paul Oulo after blocking their car on a central Nairobi street following a day of protests on Thursday by the Mungiki gang in central Kenya.
Small demonstrations broke out afterwards, with a student shot dead by police in the early hours today.
Gathering protests against alleged extrajudicial police killings have added to widespread disillusionment with the poor record of a year-old coalition government formed to end the east African nation's bloody post-election crisis a year ago.
The unrest in Kenya, the region's largest economy, will worry investors and make the government's task of rebuilding the nation after last year's post-election trauma even harder.
Prime minister Raila Odinga, who partners president Mwai Kibaki in the now strained unity government, acknowledged the crisis. "I fear we are flirting with lawlessness in the name of keeping law and order. In the process, we are hurtling towards failure as a state," he said, in a statement on the killings.
The two Oscar Foundation officials had mobilised protests yesterday against what they said was the illegal killing of 1,721 young people and the disappearance of 6,542 others suspected by the police of being Mungiki members or sympathisers.
Other rights groups, and a UN special investigator, put the number killed in a crackdown, mainly in 2007, at around 500.
Five hours before the killing of Kingara and Oulo yesterday evening, government spokesman Alfred Mutua had called the Oscar Foundation a "front" for Mungiki.
The gang, which draws support from Kenya's young and jobless, is known for its extortion rackets and gruesome killings, including beheadings. It claims to be the successor of Kenya's anti-colonial Mau Mau rebel movement.
Police in Naivasha town, an hour's drive north of Nairobi, said today they had arrested more than 70 Mungiki suspects trying to set up roadblocks overnight.
Some activists blamed authorities for the Oscar Foundation killings. But police said they suspected a set-up.
"The killings may have been carried out to tarnish the reputation of the police force," police chief Hussein Ali said. "We shall investigate all options to ascertain who it is."
A police statement said three officers had been arrested for using live ammunition on students, who had taken the body of one of the activists onto university premises.
United Nations special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions Philip Alston, who met both the dead activists during a visit to Kenya in February, called for a foreign-led probe. "It is imperative, if the Kenyan police are to be exonerated, for an independent team to be called from somewhere like Scotland Yard or the South African police to investigate," Alston said in a statement from New York.
He called last week for the dismissal of police chief Ali and resignation of Attorney-General Amos Wako after backing allegations of hundreds of killings by security forces.
Some activists said an eyewitness to Thursday's killings was also wounded in the shooting, and was taken away by police.
A group of civil society organisations issued a statement saying the two slain activists were targeted for sharing information with the UN rapporteur.
"We hold the government spokesman Dr. Alfred Mutua complicit ... for making wild allegations," it added.
Mr Mutua was not answering his phone today.
A spokesman for Mr Mungiki's political wing, Njuguna Gitau, said the Oscar Foundation had no links with Mungiki. "These people were innocent, but the (police) killer squad went for them," he told reporters.
Prime minister Odinga lambasted the government spokesman, who is seen as Kibaki's man. "Dr Mutua does not speak for the Grand Coalition Government. He alone knows whom he speaks for."
Reuters