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Following the disbandment of the Special Service Unit by the Acting Inspector General of Police Noor Gabow, Amnesty International has celebrated the directive but has called for more action.
The human rights organization recommended that the government should go the extra mile and investigate the extra-judicial killings that have been conducted by the said unit.
“Amnesty Kenya welcomes SSU disbandment. The Kenya Police must also audit SSU activities and publicly respond to allegations of responsibility for enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings of many suspects,” wrote Amnesty on their Twitter handle.
They further referred to the report they released on the Jubilee scorecard on the eve of the general elections. The report titled Human Rights Jubilee score card says that the extra-judicial killers used National parks and rivers to dump the bodies of their victims.
“Shockingly, national parks, forests and rivers have become the dumping grounds for over 30 dead people. In January 2022, for instance, Haki Africa and Amnesty International found at least 37 bodies of disappeared persons in River Yala, Siaya County. The state remains silent on the status of investigations and no perpetrators of these serious crimes have been arrested,” stated the reports.
Among the recommendations that the report gave was auditing and officially announcing the identities and circumstances of all extra-judicial killings. They also recommended that the government “Institute, publicly announce and operationalize an expedited process of prosecuting state officers while providing effective victim redress.”
President William Ruto ordered that the SSU be done away with. “We had a dilapidated economy, a debt-laden country, a deteriorated security, a police force out to kill people of Kenya instead of protecting them. I instructed the disbandment of the SSU that was responsible for killing Kenyans,” said the President.
