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Kenya vows to improve security
01/02/2007 12:32 - (SA)
Beijing - Kenyan officials have promised to improve protection of Chinese workers and interests after armed robbers killed one engineer and seriously injured another, says the Chinese foreign ministry.
Spokesperson Jiang Yu said: "China's foreign ministry has contacted the relevant departments in Kenya and urged them to take effective measures to safeguard Chinese citizens there."
Jiang said the Kenyan government had established a special group to protect Chinese citizens and investigate Tuesday's attack in Mombasa.
It was reported that four armed, masked men entered a stone-processing depot next to a site ran by the China Road and Bridge Construction Company in the early hours of Tuesday.
Engineer beaten to death
The Chinese engineers were attacked after they were woken by the four men "wildly looting" cash at the site.
The reports quoted Zhu Jing, a press officer at the Chinese embassy in Nairobi, as saying that one engineer was beaten to death and the other was seriously injured, but in stable condition at a local hospital.
Zhu said: "At present, it can be confirmed that this is an ordinary criminal case. The attackers only wanted money and had no other political purpose. The Kenyan police are hunting the suspects and hope to close the case quickly."
The reports named the dead man as 42-year-old Xu Derong and the injured man as Zhang Kui. The attack was the latest of several murders, abductions and robberies of Chinese citizens in Africa in recent months.
According to the foreign ministry, nine Chinese oil workers remained missing after an attack by armed men in Nigeria on January 25.
Sapa-dpa
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