Police chief should not turn Kenya into Banana Republic

The roguish, bullish and thuggish acts of our police should prick conscience of the nation. Though police often shoot back in self-defence that is not what has been happening. There is indiscriminate murder of ‘suspects’. That is why the visiting UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Killings, Arbitrary or Summary Executions, Prof Phillip Alston, concluded: "The Police Commissioner in particular, along with various other senior officials, assured me that no such killings take place. But he and his colleagues appear to be the only people in the entire country who believe this claim."

Those who pull the trigger, as we discerned from slain former police officer-turned-whistleblower, Bernard Kiriinya, are from an extermination squad within the police force. It appears to have been accorded the licence to kill and often fake the crime scene to reflect a struggle and shoot-out. Kiirinya’s statement was recorded by Kenya National Commission on Human Rights.

In what must be most daring and detailed confessions on operations of a police killer squad, naming places, time, names and car registrations, Kiirinya spilled the beans. The squad he worked for appeared to have a direct reporting line to director of Criminal Investigations Department, through whose office the Police Commissioner was briefed directly.

Dead men tell no tales, but this one does. He died a hunted man, betrayed and in all likelihood killed by those he worked with.

Predictably, not even a squeak has been heard from the force that is always quick to the camera to deny this and that. Maybe the evidence was awesome and incontrovertible. The killings described by Kiirinya appear borrowed from the Gestapo or Nazist Staci army. Suspects were strangled, bludgeoned and cut using pangas to disguise the killings as the work of the force.

Outlandish killings

The Mungiki movement, whose kingpins it was set to pursue, is a killer force with terrifying appetite for macabre killings. However, to kill suspects under the cover of darkness and throw the bodies into rivers, so that no one would recover them, is villainous, uncivil and criminal. As they say, two wrongs do not make a right. It is worse when police officers take over their victim’s money and properties such as vehicles.

The number of those killed in these outlandish acts and repulsive methods is chilling.

"Police are a law unto themselves and they kill often and with impunity, except in those rare instances where their actions are caught on film or recorded by outsiders in ways that cannot be dismissed,’’ said the UN official.

One would have expected the commissioner and the CID director to resign as a matter of personal honour. In total, 500 Mungiki suspects died in this wave! Add to this the 400 people police killed under the watch of present commanders with live bullets at the beginning of the year and it would make sense why the UN official said the police chief and Attorney General should resign and independent investigations be launched.

As a law abiding corporate citizen, we too demand of the Government to set up an independent probe on extra-judicial killings and nail the culprits. The last time we checked Kenya was not on the list of Banana Republics. It never will because the citizenry resolved.