NAIROBI, 2 January 2007 — A mob torched a Kenyan church yesterday, killing villagers cowering inside, as the death toll from ethnic riots triggered by President Mwai Kibaki’s disputed re-election soared to 270.
In the most grisly incident, at least 50 people died when fire engulfed a church near Eldoret town where scores of Kibaki’s Kikuyu tribe had taken refuge in fear of their lives.
The attack revived traumatic memories in East Africa of the slaughter in churches of tens of thousands of victims of Rwanda’s 1994 genocide.
Police, reporters and a senior security official said the blaze at the Kenya Assemblies of God Pentecostal church was deliberately started by a gang of youths. Witnesses said charred bodies, including women and children, were strewn about the smoldering wreckage. “This is the first time in history that any group has attacked a church. We never expected the savagery to go so far,” police spokesman Eric Kiraithe said.
Reinforcements were being rushed to the area to arrest all troublemakers “regardless of their status in society,” he said. Residents and a security source said the victims had sought safety at the church, about 8 km from Eldoret. “Some youths came to the church,” said a local reporter from the scene. “They fought with the boys who were guarding it, but they were overpowered and the youths set fire to the church.”
The explosion of violence in one of Africa’s most stable democracies and strongest economies has shocked the world and left Kenyans aghast as long-simmering tribal rivalries pitch communities against each other.
Leading local newspaper, the Daily Nation, feared Kenya was on “the verge of a complete meltdown.”
Police were out in force in the capital on New Year’s Day, and the streets were quieter. But details emerged of a rising death toll and widespread destruction in one of the country’s darkest moments since 1963 independence from Britain.
At least 70,000 people have been displaced in western Kenya by the post-electoral unrest, the Kenya Red Cross said. “This is a national disaster,” Abbas Gullet, the agency’s secretary general, told reporters.
Hundreds of Kikuyu tribespeople have crossed the border into neighboring Uganda to escape the escalating violence. They have been entering Uganda through the Malaba and Busia border posts, the officials said.
