Gunned down: Two human rights leaders murdered after Kenya accuses them over protests

Kenya is facing a storm of protest over extrajudicial killings after two of the country's leading human rights campaigners were shot dead in the capital Nairobi, hours after being criticised by a senior government official.

A UN investigator yesterday called for an international inquiry into the murders of Oscar Kamau Kingara and Paul Oulo on Thursday evening which had set off riots outside Nairobi University that left one student dead.

"It is extremely troubling when those working to defend human rights in Kenya can be assassinated in broad daylight in the middle of Nairobi," said Philip Alston, the UN's special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings. "It is imperative, if the Kenyan police are to be exonerated, for an independent team to be called from somewhere such as Scotland Yard or the South African police to investigate."

The week before, Mr Alston was in Nairobi delivering a damning report on police killings in which he called for the sacking of Kenya's chief of police and attorney general. The government shrugged off the report's findings and accused the rapporteur of "bad faith".

The killers of the activists had blocked their car on State House Road, a stone's throw from President Mwai Kibaki's official residence. Just hours before the killing, a government spokesman, Alfred Mutua, had criticised them for encouraging demonstrations against a police death squad alleged to have committed hundreds of murders. The assassinations have returned the spotlight to Kenya's murky underworld of police corruption and the activities of a quasi-religious ethnic cult known as the Mungiki. The group claim to be the ideological descendants of the Mau Mau rebels who rose against British colonial rule but others dismiss them as a criminal gang. The Mungiki's thousands of members are from Kenya's largest tribe, the Kikuyu.

The double murder brought a violent end to a day in which much of the country had been paralysed by protests said to be on behalf of the families of murdered Mungiki suspects. Kenya's battered legions of matatu mini-buses on which most people rely in the absence of a functioning public transport system were kept off the roads by the protests, and sporadic clashes killed at least four people. Protests continued last night, with police firing tear gas at students who had lit bonfires and set up roadblocks near the ambush site. Mr Kingara's NGO, the Oscar Foundation, which had helped to organise the protests, was accused by Mr Mutua of being a front for the Mungiki. Five hours later, both men were dead. "These two were well-known within the human rights community," said Florence Jaoko, head of state-funded Kenya National Commission on Human Rights. "Nothing warrants their deaths."

The police denied any involvement, and arrested three officers over the fatal shooting of the student in the clashes after the assassinations. A spokesman, Charles Owino, said: "This is a very unfortunate matter, given the fact that there was a [UN] report on extra-judicial killings just last week. So you would expect some people to say we can be involved in this. But it would be too cheap for the police to get involved with people involved in protecting rights."

The profitable matatu industry is believed to be at the centre of the dispute between police and the mafia-style sect who have competing protection rackets, extracting small bribes from the tens of thousands of mini-bus operators.

Mr Kingara's group claimed to have evidence of the killings of at least 500 young men suspected of links to the Mungiki. They are said to have been shot and dumped in the countryside.

The murders will also further damage tourism-reliant Kenya's tarnished image. Many analysts blame political corruption and impunity for exacerbating ethnic divisions and holding back economic growth, which although strong during the first half of this decade, has delivered few benefits to the impoverished majority, forced to live on as little as a dollar a day.

Murithi Mutiga: 'Kenyans view police as vigilantes with uniforms. It's very frightening'

Analysis

To hear about the killings was like a punch in the pit of the stomach: you just don't want to believe something like that can happen in your country in this day and age. We have suffered so much in Kenya but there always seems to be another crisis dragging us back, whether it's a corruption scandal or something as gruesome as this.

What's clear is that the government has a role in these deaths. The killings happened about 500 metres from the state house and no one else would have the audacity to attack there.

The problem is, ours is a country where law and order has broken down. Kenyans view police as vigilantes with uniforms and guns and it's very frightening. Police don't trust the judicial system and take the law into their own hands.

The underlying cause of the violence is our divided government, overtaken by the cancer of ethnicity that has dismantled a once broad-based coalition. That poisonous division has led to the development of many different militias who act as vigilantes or tax collectors in areas where government authority doesn't reach. Poorly trained and equipped police rarely venture into the poorest slums and when the security forces do respond, it is with a crude, blunt weapon of force. In general, things seemed to have improved. There was a time in 2008 when just going to work and returning home was an achievement: you just didn't know which militia would have set up a roadblock weeding out an ethnic minority. But now, I am hearing terrible accounts from friends.

In one way, these killings are bad news for human rights in Kenya but we are fortunate to have a vibrant civil society, an aggressive free press as well as an educated middle class. I truly believe they are our best weapons against the moral corruption of the authorities and I hope that – tragic though these deaths are – they might actually embolden us.

The writer is an editor for The Nation in Kenya