Following up on earlier news this week of violent raids by government authorities on newspaper and television offices in Kenya, the Kenyan blogger mentalacrobatics writes:
Here are some stills taken during the raid from internal CCTV cameras. The raid were carried out by a rapid response unit code-named the Kanga Squad, detectives from Nairobi provincial CID headquarters and officers from the General Service Unit. They are wearing bright orange reflective vests with “QRU” for Quick Rescue Unit/Quick Response Unit which indicates their day job of fight hardcore criminals like carjackers, bank robbers and murder hit squads.
These pictures are very disturbing. In some of them they have an employee spread eagled on the floor with a gun pressed against his/her head and a boot in his/her face. Remember these are NOT criminals being man handled like this. These are Kenyan men and women who went to work only to be pistol whipped and roughed up by an elite police squad.
Link.
And investigative blogger Kathryn Cramer tells BoingBoing,
There's some really great stuff in Demosh's photostream (photos by Fredrick Onyango)that I think gives a good sense of why the existing kenyan government seems to want to put an end to the press. Just look at the expressions on these faces. Here are photos w/ captions & links. What it seems to come down to is that the government has been caught at really widespread corruption and they've been caught, and so they panicked.
Link, and here is another Kenyan corruption scandal photostream: Link.
(Thanks, Kathryn Cramer!)
Previously on BoingBoing:
Media shutdown in Kenya — TV station, newspaper torched
