- The UN Special Rapporteur for Kenya Professor Philip Alston has called on the government to establish independent investigations into the killings of two prominent human rights activists. The activists of Oscar Foundation, Oscar King’ara and its advocacy director John Paul Oulu were shot dead near the University of Nairobi on Thursday evening.
The deaths come a week after the UN Rapporteur published a controversial report accusing Kenya's police of running death squads saying that the killings were systematic, widespread, and carefully planned. However, the police have dismissed the reports as fictitious.
The local news reports said the killings prompted unrest among the university students, which led to fierce clashes in the University.
“It is extremely troubling when those working to defend human rights in Kenya can be assassinated in broad daylight in the middle of Nairobi. This constitutes a major threat to the rule of law, regardless of who might be responsible for the killings, ” Professor Alston told local news paper Daily Nation.
Professor Alston said he met the two Oscar Foundation’s officials in February while doing investigations on the human rights level in the country, saying the deceased provided him with testimonies regarding police killings in Nairobi and Central Province.
Kenyan capital Nairobi has been tense since Thursday morning after the sect, Mungiki and university students were lined up blocking some of the major routes into the city, also burning shops in protest of the police executions on detainees.
Mr Kingara's Oscar Foundation Free Legal Aid Clinic published a report last year, which said that more than 8,000 young Kenyans have been executed or tortured to death since 2002 in a police crackdown on gangs.
Both men also provided information to the United Nations this year that helped the organisation release a report about police brutality and police killings in Kenya.
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