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North Kenya death toll rises to 55-police

Posted on: Wednesday, 13 July 2005, 09:18 CDT

By Wangui Kanina

NAIROBI (Reuters) - At least 55 people were hacked and shot to death in a raid by cattle rustlers and a subsequent revenge attack by locals in a remote area of northern Kenya, police said on Wednesday.

Up to 400 attackers carrying assault rifles and machetes killed 45 people and wounded 18 when they struck Dida Galgalu village in Marsabit District, about 100 km (62 miles) south of the Ethiopian border, in a raid for livestock early on Tuesday.

Police said locals from the Gabra clan then attacked a truck carrying people from the rival Borana clan, which they accused of the raid, and killed 10 of them in revenge.

"The death toll has risen to 55," Deputy Police Commissioner David Kimaiyo told Reuters. "Ten innocent people from Borana (community) who were going for a seminar in a Catholic mission vehicle were all massacred."

Tony Mwangi of Kenya's Red Cross said 60 people had been killed, but there was no immediate confirmation of that number.

Police said women and children were among the dead, but they had no figures on how many. Twelve children were among those seriously injured, police said.

Television footage shot at Marsabit District Hospital showed children with bullet wounds and deep gashes on legs and arms.

Police officers killed four bandits at the village and shot dead another six as they chased the raiders, who fled across the Ethiopian border, police said.

The Kenya Human Rights Commission said it was appalled by the government's failure to prevent the killings.

"That hundreds of armed criminals can terrorize a town for hours without intervention of the country's security forces is a clear indication that the government has little authority in the northeastern region," the rights group said.

SPARSELY POPULATED

Politicians from northeastern Kenya have long complained that the sparsely populated region has been neglected by successive governments since independence from Britain in 1963.

Members of parliament from the area said the attackers were from Ethiopia and complained that Kenyan forces seemed afraid to pursue the attackers into Ethiopia.

"I cannot confirm or deny that those people (attackers) were Ethiopians because investigations are still going on," Kenya's internal security minister, John Michuki, told parliament.

The minister said the 812 km (507 miles) border with Ethiopia was difficult to patrol.

Clashes in Kenya's arid east and north are frequent as clans fight for scant resources, and cross-border livestock raids are frequent. Local authorities and tribal elders in Ethiopia and Kenya had been holding recent talks on how to curb the cross-border raids in the area, Kimaiyo said.

Violence has hit in several parts of Kenya in recent months, mainly due to disputes over land, water and grazing rights.

Source: REUTERS

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