Kenyan police open fire in Nairobi slum crackdown

NAIROBI, June 7 (Reuters) Kenyan police tore through a Nairobi slum today, firing rifles and tearing down shacks in the third day of a crackdown on a stronghold of the Mungiki criminal gang blamed for a wave of beheadings, witnesses said.

Hundreds of police and paramilitary officers carrying automatic weapons and clubs thronged the Mathare slum, pulling down tin shacks with crowbars, beating people and rounding up men, women and children.

The crack of gunfire split the air every few minutes, a Reuters reporter said. Dozens of people lay face down on the ground, their hands behind their heads. One officer clubbed a woman in the throat as she clutched a baby, the reporter said.

Many people were bleeding profusely from head wounds, the blood mixing with the filthy mud along the narrow streets. As the police ripped down houses, they uncovered many vats of illegal alcohol known locally as chang'aa.

''We are hearing gun shots ... Everybody has fled the area because of the police,'' Peter Kamande, who helps run a Mathare community group, told Reuters by telephone.

Mungiki began in the 1990s as a quasi-religious sect but police say it is now a large organised crime operation like the Italian mafia. It forces Mathare residents to buy electricity and water from it at extortionate prices, and has killed or beaten people who try to oppose it.

DEATHS IN SHANTYTOWN Police killed 22 people in the shantytown on Tuesday after two of their own were murdered, and violence broke out there again yesterday when officers used whips and teargas to battle residents and arrest suspects.

Officers recovered weapons stolen from the two policemen killed late on Monday, an officer told Reuters.

Police searching for a missing officer and suspected Mungiki members forced residents to drag a muddy river at gunpoint in their search for evidence. One macabre find, which police blamed on Mungiki, was that of human remains.

''This is what Mungiki do whenever they kill somebody, they take some part of the body and use it,'' a police officer who declined to be named told Reuters, holding up a baseball cap full of what he said was human flesh.

Mungiki holds a tight grip on Mathare in particular, forcing residents to buy their water and electricity from it at high prices, and pay protection money and other ''taxes''.

The gang is known for severely punishing or killing people who speak out against it to the authorities, leaving residents powerless and frightened.

Named after the Kikuyu word for ''multitude'', Mungiki claims to have inherited the mantle of Mau Mau rebels who fought the British colonial authorities before independence in 1963, and portays itself as fighting for the poor against rich elites.

yesterday, a young man's severed and skinned head was found in Mathare, and about a dozen Mungiki ''defectors'' have been found tortured and killed, some beheaded, a tactic also employed by the Mau Mau.

The gang claims thousands of members in central Kenya, and is involved in large-scale racketeering, particularly in the lucrative minibus trade.

REUTERS GL RAI1907