289 Dead in Kenya post Election Violence -from Pakistan

This is a Pakistani Daily NEws papae repoirt about Kenyan Post election violence

read cautiously between the lines: Note the author says "289", then "nearly 290", then "nealry 300" all in the same story. There is an agenda here.

-Shimron

289 dead as EU calls Kenya poll flawed

• NAIROBI: EU monitors cast doubts Tuesday on the results of Kenya’s disputed presidential vote, stepping up the pressure on re-elected President Mwai Kibaki as his country reels from violence that has claimed nearly 290 lives.
• A second consecutive night of tribal conflict and clashes between police and protestors left more than 100 dead, with no end in sight to the post-election unrest that has plunged one of Africa’s more stable democracies into an unprecedented crisis.
• World leaders called on Kenya’s rival leaders to open a dialogue, but Raila Odinga, the opposition candidate narrowly defeated in the December 27 poll by Kibaki, said he would only talk when the president owned up to vote-rigging allegations.

“The conditions under which we are prepared to negotiate is that Kibaki must first accept that he did not win the elections,” Odinga said in an interview with the BBC.

• His charges of fraud were lent extra weight by the EU election monitoring team which issued a report Tuesday saying the vote had “fallen short” of international standards and called for an independent audit into the results.
• The polls were “marred by a lack of transparency in the processing and tallying of presidential results, which raises concerns about the accuracy of the final results,” the report said.
• “We believe it is vital that an impartial investigation into the accuracy of the presidential results is conducted,” chief EU observer Alexander Graf Lambsdorff told reporters
• .British PM: Britain joined international calls for calm, with Prime Minister Gordon Brown speaking by telephone to both Kabika and Odinga. “What I want to see is them coming together, I want to see talks and I want to see reconciliation and unity,” Brown said.
• While noting the widespread allegations of vote-rigging, Brown argued that “the first priority” was ending the violence.

Events

• Clashes were reported by police and witnesses overnight in most Nairobi slums as well as in several of Odinga’s strongholds in western Kenya.
• The city of Kisumu, northwest of Nairobi, appeared to be the worst affected, with a mortuary attendant telling AFP that 48 bodies were brought in overnight.
• The violence is the worst Kenya has witnessed since a failed 1982 coup.
• Slum areas were overrun by rioters burning down shops belonging to members of Kibaki’s Kikuyu tribe and looting anything from refrigerators to basic goods, which have started running out since the crisis brought East Africa’s largest economy to a standstill.

According to a tally compiled by AFP, 289 people have died in politically related violence since the December 27 elections.

The incident is likely to raise concerns that the wave of post-election violence that has now claimed nearly 300 lives in Kenya could develop into a full-blown ethnic conflict.

A police commander said police had been given shoot-to-kill orders for Eldoret, the town where the Kenya Assemblies of God church was located.

The Rest @ Daily Times-Pakistan