Human rights groups have been calling on the Government to negotiate with the sect members with a view of ending the extra-judicial killings.

The government of Kenya has admitted that it was not easy to wipe out Mungiki-like gangs, and ruled out any negotiations with sect members.

Last month, the police announced that they had killed 37 suspects during the crackdown on Mungiki in Mathare slums. The sect’s leaders placed the death toll at more than 100. But Mathare residents and human rights organisations can only account for 14 bodies.

Locked in a war with Kenya’s police, the Mungiki criminal gang has already spread enough fear and violence to have made its name the word that is not spoken aloud in Kenya’s fertile highlands.

The items, found inside a house where 12 Mungiki suspects were shot dead in Murang’a on Sunday, offer spine-chilling insights into oathing ceremonies conducted by the killer gang.

Lately, screaming headlines in the bawdy tabloid newspapers of Nairobi have described the so-called Mungiki Menace. Dark tales of moonlight oath ceremonies have been followed by vows from politicians to end the violence and by police crackdowns targeting one of the city’s sprawling slums, where members of the secretive sect extort money from the poorest of the poor.

Kenya police in two days shot and killed 10 men suspected of being members of an outlawed religious sect accused of a string of beheadings in and around the capital, police said on Tuesday.

What began as a harmless traditional religious grouping a decade ago has evolved into an evil, destructive and multi-faceted monster.

It was a night of grisly Mungiki killings and action by police against suspects that left 22 people dead. In what police believe were revenge killings, three people were beheaded in Banana, Kiambu; five were shot dead in a Kariobangi bar and three while driving along Kangundo Road.

These days Charity Bokindo, the district commissioner of Nairobi North, is taking no chances. Wherever she goes, she carries not one but two pistols, and she always travels with armed guards.

The former leader of outlawed Mungiki sect John Kamunya, alias Maina Njenga, was today sentenced to five years for being in possession of a gun and trafficking marijuana.

Police swooped into Nairobi’s Mathare slum after the killings and subsequent beheadings of at least half a dozen people by the outlawed Mungiki sect, and rounded up men, women and children said to be linked to the group.

Police in Kenya are battling Mungiki – a quasi-religious sect of criminals.

Suspected Mungiki sect members have issued fresh threats as the government of Kenya declared total war on the outlawed group.

Gunbattles erupted as police conducted house-to-house searches for members of an outlawed sect accused of terrorizing Kenyans and leaving behind a string of beheaded corpses.

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