Former UN boss Kofi Annan today called for an investigation into "gross and systematic" abuses in Kenya after visiting areas that have been hit by post-election violence.
Graca Machel, the wife of Nelson Mandela (left), and former Tanzanian president Benjamin Mkapa (right) listen as former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan speaks during a news conference in Nairobi today.
"We saw gross and systematic abuse of human rights ... it is essential the facts be established and those responsible be held to account," Annan told reporters in Nairobi. "The government will have to do whatever it can to increase security."
Earlier gunfire rang out in Nakuru this morning and armed gangs manned roadblocks in the western Kenyan town where at least 25 people have been killed in ethnic clashes since Thursday, witnesses said.
Paramilitary police patrolled the Rift Valley provincial capital, which had previously been spared post-election chaos that has killed around 700 people since disputed December 27th polls.
Hostile youths armed with crude weapons stopped journalists at multiple roadblocks in the town, preventing them from reaching the scene of the shooting.
"There is nothing we can do. All those who are fanning the violence are staying comfortably in their luxury homes while we burn," said resident Urunga Maina, who rushed his nephew to hospital after he was hacked by a machete-wielding mob.
"We are being used as sacrificial lambs," Maina said. "What matters is that the politicians take what they want. They don't care about the wananchi (ordinary people)."
More than 100 injured people were admitted at the hospital, including one man with an arrow lodged in his head.
A doctor said he had recorded nine bodies, all with deep machete wounds. At the Nakuru morgue, relatives wept as police unloaded another 16 charred corpses from a truck.
The authorities had imposed a dusk-to-dawn curfew on the town in a bid to contain pitched battles between tribal gangs.
The fighting has also seen the first deployment of Kenya's military since the start of a month of bloodshed that has horrified Western powers, damaged one of Africa's most promising economies and shattered the country's peaceful image.
And it undermined hopes of a solution after President Mwai Kibaki met his rival Raila Odinga on Thursday in their first talks since the troubles began. Mr Odinga says the vote was rigged.
In bloodshed elsewhere, police said on Saturday that two men were hacked to death overnight in Naivasha, also in Rift Valley.