-
The gang had been lying waiting on a main route leading to Loruk when they attacked the team on February 29 at about 5 pm.
-
Witnesses and police said the team had attended the burial event of slain blind headteacher Thomas Kibet and was driving back in a convoy when they were attacked.
Image: ATTACK
A contingent of security personnel leaving the burial of a blind teacher who had been killed by gunmen was attacked by suspected bandits in Baringo.
This prompted a brief exchange of fire before the security team changed their route, police said.
The gang had been lying waiting on a main route leading to Loruk when they attacked the team on February 29 at about 5 pm.
Witnesses and police said the team had attended the burial event of slain blind headteacher Thomas Kibet and was driving back in a convoy when they were attacked.
Local leaders had flown to the event after an earlier meeting with Interior Cabinet Secretary Kithure Kindiki in Nairobi.
Police said the bandits had earlier attacked a village in the area and stole an unknown number of livestock when they ran into the convoy leaving the burial event at the Kagir Lugger area.
No injuries were reported in the attack, police said.
This is after the bandits managed to drive away with the animals.
Kibet who was the headteacher at Kagir Primary School in Baringo North, was on a motorcycle with his wife and a child on their way to Kipcherere Secondary School in the same subcounty when they were ambushed by armed bandits in Namba on February 10.
The slain teacher had survived an attack by bandits in 1978 when he was barely nine years old, but the bullet wounds he sustained at that time left him blind.
On Thursday, Kindiki met Baringo's elected leaders to get long-term solutions to national security threats.
He said the government is continuously engaging with various stakeholders and reviewing the interventions required to address historical, current and emerging security challenges from the grassroots, upwards to the national level.
Kindiki said the meeting was meant to identify the gaps and generate consensus on strategies to win the war against banditry and livestock rustling.
Over 30 people have been killed in separate attacks in the region in the past months amid calls to address the menace of banditry.
This comes amid sustained operations by the multi-agency teams against the incidents.
Kindiki has been leading the operations in the area vowing to end the menace.
He said cattle rustling in Northern Kenya has over the years become an organised criminal enterprise responsible for deaths, poverty and displacement.
“Its impacts are severe. It deprives pastoral communities of their economic mainstay and aggravates the conditions of poverty in the rangelands, fuelling communal grievances and revenge attacks,” he said.
To dismantle the infrastructure of cattle rustlers and facilitators he said, the government is sustaining the war on banditry and its perpetrators, enablers, benefactors and beneficiaries by making banditry a painful venture, ensuring recovery of stolen livestock and rewarding facilitators of recoveries.