Six people have been killed in Kenya by police officers on Wednesday during new protests against the rising cost of living.
A health worker said more than 50 schoolchildren in the capital, Nairobi, were tear-gassed.
The police official, who spoke to the Associated Press on condition of anonymity because the official wasn’t authorised to speak publicly, said three people were killed in Mlolongo city in Machakos county, two in Kitengela town near Nairobi, and one in the town of Emali on the highway to the port city of Mombasa.
The officer said more than 10 others were taken to hospitals.
The official said the six who were killed were shot for disrupting businesses, without elaborating.
Kenyan police have been criticized by human rights watchdogs for their deadly response to such protests.
According to Associated Press, a health records worker at the Eagle Nursing Home clinic in Nairobi’s Kangemi neighbourhood said 53 children were treated after tear gas was thrown into their school.
The children aged 10 to about 15 had been in shock, said Alvin Sikuku.
“At this point they are OK, with their parents,” he said Wednesday evening, and tensions around the incident were fading: “Right now, things are cool.”
One civil society watchdog, the Independent Medico-Legal Unit, said in a statement it was “horrifying to hear about police officers using such excessive force.”
In other parts of Nairobi, hundreds of protesters burned tires and dismantled part of an entrance to a recently built toll expressway that for some stands as a symbol of inequality — a relatively lightly travelled highway by those who can afford it as everyday traffic surges below. Traffic came to a halt amid the chaos.
Kenya’s interior ministry in a statement accused opposition supporters of “extensive damage of major public assets” and asserted that scores of civilians and law enforcement officers were injured.
Opposition leader Raila Odinga, who lost last year’s election to President William Ruto, has repeatedly called on Kenyans to protest as the country struggles with debt and rising prices.
Odinga told journalists that such protests will continue, and he accused police of blocking access to the site where he had planned to make a speech.
“All our engagements are peaceful until the police show up,” Odinga said.
New taxes have added to frustration in East Africa’s economic hub, with inflation at around 8%. Taxes on petroleum products, including gasoline, have doubled from 8% to 16%, which is expected to have a ripple effect.
Odinga called on Ruto to repeal the act imposing the new measures. “People are tired of going to bed hungry, facing the new day hungry and returning to bed hungry,” he said.