Kenyan death squads blamed for activists' deaths

NAIROBI, Kenya -- Activists Oscar Kamau Kingara and John Paul Oulu spent years demanding justice for thousands who they said disappeared at the hands of government death squads.

On Thursday night the two men were shot dead on their way to meet with a senior member of Kenya's top human rights group. Their car was raked with automatic gunfire on a leafy suburban street in front of hundreds of horrified onlookers, a minute's walk from the heavily guarded presidential residence. The attackers escaped.

Rights groups charged Friday that the shooting was retaliation for a probe of police death squads blamed by human rights groups and the U.N. for the execution of hundreds of young Kenyans whose mutilated bodies were dumped in rivers, lakes and at morgues.

Prime Minister Raila Odinga expressed sympathy for the two activists.

"It is worrying and I fear that we are flirting with lawlessness in the name of keeping law and order. In the process, we are hurtling towards failure as a state," his office said. It called for an independent investigation into the killings and distanced the prime minister from critical comments by a government spokesman about the dead activists' organization.

Police commissioner Hussein Ali said the police were investigating all possibilities regarding the killings of the activists. He has repeatedly dismissed charges of police links to hit squads.

The killings sparked two days of clashes between students and police in which one student was shot dead. Three policemen were arrested over that death.

Former Kenyan dictator Daniel arap Moi used the security services to kill and torture critics for decades. Citizens had hoped the terror would end after the country's first democratic election, in 2002.

But rights groups say the police service was not reformed and many of the officers responsible for abuses remained in charge.

Kingara, a 37-year-old father of two, set up a legal aid organization in 1997 to help poor Kenyans fight courts that favored the rich. He and Oulu, a former official at the University of Nairobi student union, began researching extrajudicial killings after clients began complaining about kidnappings and murders of relatives.

Kingara frequently denounced President Mwai Kibaki's government for setting up secret death squads to eliminate the Mungiki, a brutal gang that originally presented itself as a quasi-religious sect promoting the culture of the Kikuyu, Kenya's largest tribe.

The gang grew in strength as it set up a network of protection rackets and drew members from the millions of unemployed or underemployed youths.

Kingara alleged that in 2007, when the gang beheaded those who refused to pay, along with several policemen, the government used the death squads to crack down and extrajudicial killings intensified.

Kingara and Oulu had provided evidence to Philip Alston, the U.N.'s special expert on extrajudicial executions. Last week, Alston issued a preliminary report accusing the government of running death squads, targeting protesters during postelection riots last year and running detention centers where Kenyans were tortured and murdered during a crackdown on a militia fighting over land in the west of the country. Alston called for the dismissal of the police chief and attorney general.

The government, after initially dismissing his findings, eventually promised to look into them. But on Thursday, a government spokesman accused the Oscar Foundation of links to the Mungiki hours before Kingara and Oulu were killed.

"It is extremely troubling when those working to defend human rights in Kenya can be assassinated in broad daylight in the middle of Nairobi," Alston said. "This constitutes a major threat to the rule of law, regardless of who might be responsible."

The U.S. Embassy offered the immediate assistance of the FBI in tracking down the activists' killers.

"We urge government to do all in its power to bring those responsible for the murders to justice and to prevent Kenya from becoming a place where human rights defenders can be murdered with impunity," the embassy said.

In January, an investigative journalist who had written about police misconduct was beheaded. Last year, a former police driver turned whistleblower was fatally shot.

No suspects have been charged.

"It is obvious that there is a pattern," said Florence Simbiri-Jaoko, chairwoman of the state-funded Kenya National Commission on Human Rights. Kingara and Oulu on their way to meet a commission official when they were shot. All four victims "are linked by the fact that they were doing work on extrajudicial killings."

Driver Birnard Kiriinya was killed after presenting testimony to the state-funded commission about scores of executions by police during a the gang crackdown. He alleged officers frequently used clubs and ropes to kill suspects to avoid suspicion they were shot by police.

Some were tortured by having eyes or genitals removed, he said, and the wife of one gang leader was raped with a bottle before being killed. Of another incident, he wrote "thorough investigations were done by means of beating the suspects with clubs and kicking them ... they disfigured his face so that nobody would recognize his body under all circumstances."

Simbiri-Jaoko's organization released a report in September linking the police to nearly 500 deaths during a crackdown on the gang from June-October 2007. The Oscar Foundation compiled a report in 2007 saying over 8,000 young Kenyans had been executed or tortured to death and further 4,070 had gone missing from police custody since 2002.