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61 Kenyan militia members held
13/03/2008 09:57 - (SA)
Eldoret - Security forces have arrested 61 suspected members of a tribal militia in western Kenya just days after the army launched a massive crackdown on the group, said a local official on Wednesday.
"We have arrested 61 people who were trying to escape to other districts neighbouring Mont Elgon because they were acting in suspicious manners," said Western Provincial Commissioner Abdul Mwasera.
On Sunday, Kenya's army launched a major crackdown on the rag-tag Sabaot Land Defence Force (SDLF) militia, accused by police of killing at least 500 people in the past year alone and displacing thousands of others.
Last week, the SDLF attacked a village in the area and killed 15 people, hacking, shooting and burning them to death.
100 people arrested
The government had imposed a dusk-to-dawn curfew for the Mount Elgon region, located some 300km northwest of Nairobi.
Although Mwasera said he was unaware of any victims in the crackdown, local residents said one person was killed at a school on Tuesday evening, where security forces arrested roughly 100 people.
The forces also prevented a number of Kenyan journalists from covering their operations on the ground, confiscating some of their work material.
The SLDF was demanding the annulment of a government settlement scheme, which it deemed unfair because it displaced the small Sabaot tribes from their ancestral land.
The group intensified attacks in 2006 and killed several villagers and destroyed homes in the fertile Mount Elgon region near the border with Uganda.
The violence in the flashpoint area was not directly linked to the turmoil that erupted after Kenya's disputed December elections, but tribal and land disputes had been exacerbated in recent weeks.
- AFP
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