In Kenya's Baringo county, police raid, burn and murder

     

On the trail of police who storm a village, burn down homes, steal livestock - and murder an 80-year-old man.

Chemolingot, Kenya - One May afternoon along a dirt road in a remote swath of Kenya's Baringo County lay the remains of an elderly man. Wild animals had eaten his flesh, torn off some of his limbs, and dragged his body - now mostly bones. A purple shawl and a yellow football jersey clung to the skeleton.

Witnesses say nine days earlier, several truckloads of police officers raided their village, burning their huts and stealing their goats. Officers then threw rocks at the elderly man who had tried to escape. They loaded him onto a truck, dumped him by the side of the road and shot him.

Reporting by Al Jazeera corroborates witnesses' accounts that on May 9, Kenyan police murdered 80-year-old Ekurio Mugeluk and left his body to the wild.

Next to the bloodstained gravel where Mugeluk's body first lay, Al Jazeera discovered a pile of 14, 7.62 × 51 mm cartridge cases - evidence of ammunition fired by a weapon such as the G3-type self-loading rifle which is common in Kenya. The cartridge cases were stamped with markings indicating they were manufactured in 2016 by the Kenya Ordnance Factory Corporation, which operates Kenya's ammunition plant in the town of Eldoret. That factory does not sell ammunition to civilians and only provides a domestic supply to the Kenyan police and military. Produced just last year, there was a very narrow window of time in which the authorities might have illegally diverted these bullets to civilians.

Three metres from the body lay a pile of seven, 7.62 × 39 mm cartridges - bullets used in AK type self-loading rifles - which appear to have come from the same factory.

Three different forensic experts were shown high-resolution images of Mugeluk's body and the bullet cartridge cases. A forensic anthropologist with extensive field experience said that several holes in the photographed skeleton were consistent with gunshot wounds, although it is unclear how many of the 21 government-issued bullets struck him. All three agreed that the body had decomposed in a way that fits with the hot climate of the region and the timeframe witnesses provided of his death.

  

Cattle rustling violence

Mugeluk's murder occurred amid a fight in rural Kenya over grassland and livestock that has been exacerbated in recent months by severe drought.

Today, much of Baringo county is dry and lacks grass for grazing. As herders move their cows, goats and sheep further afield in search of what little vegetation remains, conflicts sometimes ensue between communities competing over resources.

The proliferation of weapons and ammunition has turned these fights increasingly violent, sometimes deadly. Armed gunmen routinely steal livestock and sometimes shoot at their owners in the process. AFP reported that in May 2015, 75 people were killed in one raid. In January, two children were reported killed during a raid that netted 200 goats. Cattle rustling has gone on in East Africa for years, but since late 2016, Baringo County, in particular, has seen thousands of livestock stolen and dozens of people shot or killed.

Police are sometimes injured or killed by rustlers. In 2012, dozens of officers were killed during a shoot-out with cattle rustlers in Samburu County, which borders Baringo. A police chief in neighbouring Laikipia country was wounded by rustlers in February, and in May three police officers were reported killed in Samburu.

It was ostensibly in response to cattle rustling that on May 9, police raided the village of Seretion in an operation to confiscate stolen livestock. Instead, according to villagers, police themselves stole hundreds of goats. Al Jazeera documented three houses that were burned to the ground. After the raid, witnesses say police murdered Mugeluk, who had been out herding camels. 

It is rare to find hard evidence of murders by police in areas as remote as this.

"Generally, police in rural areas are very punitive and they act like they're above the law," says Otsieno Namwaya, Africa Researcher for Human Rights Watch. "In Baringo, there are two factors. One is that police twist the narrative that they are fighting bandits. Whenever they kill anyone, they say he was a bandit."

"And secondly, a lot of journalists are not accessing some of these remote parts of Baringo, so it's only the police's word that comes out," Namwaya says. "Police take advantage that this is an area that is totally out of the eye of the public."

Sometimes police operations look more like lawless raids, Namwaya explains.

"Police move into a village and don't care whether you are innocent or are guilty. They arrest everybody, beat them up, extort money, destroy property. And cases of killing happen, too."

        Many of the police murders that have been documented in Kenya are targeted killings. In 2014, members of Kenya's Anti-Terrorism Police Unit admitted to Al Jazeera that they'd been ordered to illegally assassinate, rather than arrest, suspects in Kenya's controversial "war on terror" against armed group al-Shabab, resulting in an estimated 500 deaths.

It's a war that's been fought by indiscriminately rounding up thousands of foreign-looking people and locking them for days in a Nairobi football stadium, and by threatening to shut down Kenya's two northern refugee camps, which would uproot the hundreds of thousands of refugees who seek safety there.

Last year, Human Rights Watch documented 45 suspected extrajudicial killings and disappearances related to counterterrorism operations in northeastern Kenya alone.

Other times, police or military officers have killed civilians for no apparent reason. In January 2015, Kenyan soldiers appear to have beaten to death a 37-year-old Muslim man near the coastal city of Mombasa, leaving his body in a patch of woods. The soldiers were never prosecuted.

"Holding police officers accountable is becoming increasingly difficult because there are so many cases of killings," Namwaya says. "Sometimes, they operate like there is no law."....