Re: KIBAKI'S KILLINGS SHOULD BE STOPPED

Forwarded by George Rono
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Boy, 2, beheaded and diced

Brisbane Times, Australia/July 12, 2007

Nairobi -- A two-year-old boy was beheaded and chopped up in a Kenyan capital slum today, police said, amid a fierce crackdown on an illegal sect blamed for a string of murders and decapitations.

The boy's mutilated torso was discovered in a maize farm and his head 500 metres away at a river bank in capital's Nairobi's crime-prone Korogocho slums, police commander Paul Ruto said.

The remains had no limbs, the chest was lacerated and the genitals chopped off, raising speculation that the body parts might be used in rites by the politically-linked Mungiki sect.

"The boy has been identified positively by his father who says he went missing two days ago. We have recorded statements from several people and are now searching for the killers," Ruto said.

The remains were discovered hours after police said they had killed 12 people in a crackdown on organised crime gangs in Nairobi, including members of Mungiki.

Once a religious group of dreadlocked youths who embraced traditional rituals, Mungiki has morphed into a ruthless gang blamed for criminal activities including extortion and murder.

Since March, the sect -- which was banned in 2002 -- has been blamed for the murders of at least 43 people, 13 of whom were beheaded, mostly in Nairobi slums and central Kenya.

The group also has alleged historic ties to the Mau Mau independence uprising, and is said to perpetuate customs such as female excision.

The police crackdown against it comes ahead of December general elections.

So far, it has resulted in the deaths of at least 79 Mungiki members and more than 3,000 arrests nationwide.

Police said 11 of the 12 suspects killed were linked to a foiled carjacking and robberies in three Nairobi suburbs. At least three of them were members of the Mungiki sect, they added.

"We have intensified the crackdown on all organised gangs, including Mungiki," said another police commander, Julius Ndegwa.

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Kenyan gang hopes to inspire civil unrest during election year
Washington Post/July 8, 2007
By Washington Post

Nairobi -- An unimposing man known as Joe, alias Robertson Buili, alias Ndegwa, appeared about 2 p.m. at the Maxland Restaurant, took a seat, and ordered a warm beer. At least five bodyguards followed, and tailing them a few minutes behind, the area police chief.

Buili, 36, was greeted by two bow-tied waiters who apparently recognized him as a leader in the Mungiki, a cultlike gang suspected of at least 12 beheadings and other Mafia-style murders that have terrorized the Kenyan capital in recent weeks.

"The owner of this place has come to me," Buili explained, referring elliptically to a recent recruit. "We are the masses. We are the people. And we are just in a warm-up now."

Lately, screaming headlines in the tabloid newspapers of Nairobi have described the so-called Mungiki Menace.

Dark tales of moonlight oath ceremonies have been followed by vows from politicians to end the violence, and by police crackdowns targeting one of the city's sprawling slums, where members of the secretive sect extort money from the poorest of the poor.

Although the Mungiki claims thousands of members, it is difficult to say how widespread the sect is, much less what it is: the dying embers of a more violent 1990s Kenya or perhaps a sign of the growing urban poverty afflicting cities across Africa.

Kenyans pride themselves on their relatively progressive country, an island of calm in the turbulent Horn of Africa, and many dismiss the Mungiki as nothing more than a brutal if politically connected extortion racket.

To others, though, the Mungiki violence -- wrapped in the ideology of the dispossessed and a warped tribal identity -- has raised the question of whether the kind of large-scale civil unrest that the sect's leaders have promised to inspire this election year is possible in Kenya.