[Video] Killing Kenya

By Al-Jazeera

Last December, an Al Jazeera network investigation examined shocking claims that the government of Kenya has been running secret police death squads, tasked with assassinating suspected terrorists and criminals. At the time the Kenyan government strongly refuted the allegations but reports and rumours in Kenya about extra-judicial killings have continued to proliferate.

Ten months on, People and Power asked Mohammed Ali, one of Kenya’s top independent investigative journalists, to find out why.

In this deeply worrying film, Ali discovers that mysterious killings are indeed continuing amid a culture of apparent impunity, leaving Kenyan security forces open to suspicions that they are unaccountable and seemingly out of control.

He discovers that over 1,500 Kenyan citizens have been killed by the police since 2009, and that statistically, Kenyans are currently five times more likely to be shot by a policeman than a criminal.

With often little or no investigation by the Kenyan state into the circumstances surrounding these deaths, he finds evidence to suggest that an increasing number of Kenyan police officers may be complicit in what have been described as summary executions of suspects.

Even the Kenyan army, seen by most Kenyans as less corrupt and more trustworthy than the police, is now allegedly implicated in the torture and forced disappearance of terror suspects in the country’s northeastern region.

This film contains graphic images of violence and its aftermath that some viewers may find disturbing.

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