By DPA
Nairobi : A Kenyan human rights group Monday charged the country’s police with killing more than 8,000 people over the last five years in connection with an outlawed sect accused of gruesome beheadings.
Some 8,040 alleged members of the banned Mungiki group were killed in execution style or tortured to death, while more than 4,000 others went missing, the Oscar Foundation Free Legal Aid Clinic-Kenya group said.
It said its findings were based on interviews with relatives, autopsy reports and police records.
The report comes weeks after the government funded independent human rights body said some 500 people were killed with a bullet to the head, allegedly by police in their Mungiki crackdown, in a period of five months.
The Mungiki were outlawed in 2002 following a spate of slum violence and are a pseudo-religious group from the Kikuyu ethnicity that has become one of Kenya’s largest crime and extortion rings.
They were blamed for a series of beheadings earlier this year that sparked a harsh police crackdown in the slums where the gang members are known to operate.
The allegations against the police come just over a month ahead of elections.
International rights groups have also chided the police for extra-judicial killings.