Africa-Press – Kenya. A 24-year-old man from the Chundwa area in Lamu County is seeking justice after he was allegedly shot by police on Monday night. Mudhir Omar is now receiving treatment at the Coast General Teaching and Referral Hospital after the bullet lodged in his right leg was finally removed.
Omar told The Star that four officers approached him together with three friends outside one of the friend’s shops, some minutes past 9 pm Monday night and started questioning them.
“One of the officers came to where I was seated and pulled my kikoi, he pushed me for no reason and started beating me. That is when I decided to take off before I had a gunshot. I ran until I fell off only to wake up Tuesday morning at the hospital,” said Omar.
According to the details given to him, a fisherman heading to the ocean picked him up and alerted his family who came quickly and rushed him to Faza Hospital. His mother, Mkuu Bwanamadhi, said she reported the matter to village elders soon after she received the reports of the shooting.
“The village elders advised me to go to the assistant chief where I reported the matter. I called the boy’s father to inform him about what had happened,” she said. The mother said no police officer is willing to investigate the matter.
“It is only the next morning that the area OCS accompanied by DCIO officers came to interrogate me after my husband had made calls to find out what had happened. Apparently, there was no report in the Occurrence Book about the shooting incident,” she said.
After undergoing an x-ray scan at the King Fahad Hospital, the mother said, that they decided to take the boy to Coast General to have the bullet removed.
Human rights organization, Muslim for Human Rights (MUHURI), visited the boy at Coast General Hospital and called on Independent Police Oversight Authority (IPOA) to investigate the matter so that the officers involved are apprehended and taken to court.
Muhuri rapid response officer Francis Auma said that this incident was a result of the utterance by the Inspector General of Police Japhet Koome, who defended the police on the use of firearms.
The IG, while attending a memorial service for fallen officers from the National Police Service and the Kenya Prisons Service at the Training College in Embakasi last Friday, hit out at the IPOA for criticizing police work.
He said IPOA only investigates cases involving police errors and not officers killed in the line of duty Auma said this might led to an increase in trigger-happy police.
“The police are now trigger-happy because their boss asked them to use those guns and not treat them as a pen. If the matter is not investigated, then more people will get hurt at the hands of police,” said Auma.
Auma said the current government has a negative perception of human rights organizations, yet they are registered in Kenya and are being regulated by the government.
He said that the interest of human rights organizations is to look after the rights of everyone, be it officers or citizens regardless of colour, rank or position
“We fight for all human rights, police are also humans. In fact, we have been instrumental in police reforms, we even the contributed to National Police Service Act,” he said.
“They (police) are our people, some are our relatives, and we live with them in our estates and houses. It is wrong for the IG to say that human rights don’t fight for the police. We shall continue fighting for any individual’s rights.”
Auma said that the police and human rights organizations need to collaborate and work together to ensure human rights are protected. “Our core business as organizations are to ensure that we fight for human rights, let us not incite against each other,” he said.
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