Report highlights sharp rise in police shootings

An increasing proportion of people dying of gunshot wounds in Kenya are victims of police shootings, according to a new report by Kenya's chief government pathologist, Dr Kirasi Olumbe, cited by the BBC.

The Kenyan police force was responsible for 90 percent of people shot dead in 2001, compared to a figure of 60 percent from 1997 to 2000, according to the report, released in Australia by Dr Olumbe.

"It could be argued that the increase in police shootings was in response to the increase in fire-armed criminals they confronted... but some might see it as an increase in unjustified lethal shootings by police," the BBC quoted Olumbe's report as saying.

The total number of people shot dead by both police and armed thugs had increased sharply in 2001, the report stated. Some 255 people lost their lives as a result of gunshot wounds last year, compared with 141 the previous year, 180 in 1999, and 141 in 1998, the independent Daily Nation newspaper cited it as saying.

Of the 255 victims of fatal shootings last year, 232 were shot by police, with 23 dying as a result of armed crime, it added.

Kenyan police spokesman Peter Kimanthi told IRIN on Tuesday that the figures cited from the report did not agree with statistics held at the police commissioner's office.

"I have a quarrel with those figures, I don't know where they come from," he said. "The figures are intended to mislead."

Although Kimanthi said the police's official figures for the number of people shot dead by members of the force were "very different", he did not have the exact numbers available.

However, Kimanthi said that a total of 160 regular police officers, administration police and police reservists were killed by armed thugs in the three years from 1998 to 2001.

Some 1,748 civilians had also lost their lives to armed crime over the same period, according to official police figures, Kimanthi told IRIN.

Olumbe's study, based on firearm deaths recorded at the Nairobi city mortuary, documents firearm deaths in some of Kenya's most crime-prone areas: Kiambu and Thika, on the outskirts of the capital, Nairobi; Kajiado, 50 km south of Nairobi; Machakos, about 50 km southeast of Nairobi, Kenya, and Nairobi city itself.

Kimanthi criticised the study for only recording gunshot deaths in these areas, rather than across the entire country. "Nairobi is not the only mortuary in the country," he said.

Kenyan police were heavily criticised by human rights and religious groups in June 2000 when a group of seven suspected criminals were allegedly forced out of a public bus by a police anti-theft squad and shot dead at the roadside.

The human rights organisation Amnesty International said at the time that the incident was "yet another indication of the authorities' disregard for the human rights of Kenyans".

Despite calls for an external investigation into the incident, only an internal enquiry by police is being conducted, according to the Daily Nation. No officers had been charged in connection with the incident and were still working, it added.

In its report "Kenya: Ending the Cycle of Impunity", in June 2001, Amnesty said there was a need for independent, rather than police-led, investigations of such cases.

Kimanthi claimed, however, that only the police had the necessary expertise to carry out such investigations.

"Other professional groups conduct their own investigations. I don't see an independent organisation doing any good," he told IRIN.