- 31 people have so far been allegedly killed and or disappeared by police between January and June.
- Some 100 such cases were recorded over the same period in 2020.
Image: FILE
Thirty-one people have allegedly been executed or disappeared in the hands of police since January according to data by an independent platform tracking police use of force.
Missing Voices, a website maintained by human rights lobbies in Nairobi, shows March and June were the deadliest months with 11 and 17 people killed respectively.
The civil society organisations include International Justice Mission, Kenya Human Rights Commission and a host of grassroots and slum-based social justice centres.
According to the data, seven people were killed in January while some seven others disappeared. In February, six people were extrajudicially killed while four disappeared.
According to the site, seven such killings were recorded in April while six were reported in May. Two people disappeared in March and another four in June.
Comparatively, around 100 killings and enforced disappearances allegedly blamed on the police were recorded by the site for the same period last year.
The site shows that in 2020, January recorded 20 extrajudicial deaths and disappearances, February (19), March (14), and April (17). May 2020 was the deadliest, according to the site while June had the least number of police-attributed disappearances and killings.
For the whole of 2020, a total of 167 extra-judicial killings and disappearances were recorded. They included 157 deaths and 10 enforced disappearances.
The high number of deaths and disappearances in 2020 was attributed to the onset of curfew in March last year when the state started implementing Covid-19 containment measures. Police are said to have used excessive force in enforcing the protocols.
Meetings in social places such as churches, burials, weddings and bars were banned.
Police were blamed for using brute, sometimes, deadly force to enforce the rules.
Viewed in context, however, the 2021 numbers suggest a decline in extrajudicial killings and disappearances.
The report comes in the wake of a public outrage stoked by the killing of the two Embu brothers who were murdered by police in Kianjokama market and one person who got shot at the back of the head.
A postmortem examination conducted on August 6 showed that Benson Njiru Ndwiga, 22, and Emmanuel Mutura Ndwiga, 19, died as a result of broken ribs and head injuries caused by blunt objects.
Inspector General Hillary Mutyambai and the Independent Police Oversight Authority have dispatched teams to investigate the incidents. Senior police officers in the affected areas have also been transferred.
Police have however denied the numbers, rejecting the assertion by the lobbies that officers use excessive force.
The service argues that police officers are held accountable for their individual actions and that the lobbies tend to blanketly blame police even on deaths committed by criminals.
-Edited by SKanyara