Kenyan police fought hundreds of protesters in trouble spots across the country on Wednesday, killing two as the opposition defied a ban on rallies against President Mwai Kibaki's disputed re-election. In the western towns of Kisumu and Eldoret, in the capital Nairobi and on the coast, security forces clashed with youths, some of whom set up roadblocks and burnt tyres.
Police in Kisumu, an opposition stronghold, fired in the air and used teargas and batons to disperse a 1,000-strong crowd. Two men were shot dead, witnesses said. A Reuters cameraman saw a corpse in the street, with bullet wounds in the back and side.
"We are receiving more gunshot victims," said a doctor at a Kisumu hospital who asked not be named. "The violence is still raging," he told Reuters as a man on a stretcher with a bullet wound in his chest gasped in pain. More than 600 people have died and 250,000 been left homeless by the turmoil since Kibaki was sworn in following a December 27 ballot that the leader of the opposition Orange Democratic Movement (ODM), Raila Odinga, says was rigged. In Nairobi, police chased protesters through the central business district, firing teargas and live rounds in the air.
Three youths were shot in the back of the leg as they tried to run from officers in the city's sprawling Kibera slum, one of Africa's biggest, a hospital administrator said. "It was so crowded, a very narrow place. I was trying to escape and I got a bullet in my leg," one of the three, 18-year-old student Oscar Junior, said from his hospital bed.