Opposition Legislator Slain In Kenya, Sparking Clashes

NAIROBI, Jan. 29 -- Just hours after an opposition lawmaker was gunned down in his driveway here, the fury that has swept over this country since last month's disputed presidential election arrived in his middle-class neighborhood.

The repercussions from the killing Tuesday morning of Mugabe Were, cast by opposition supporters as the first political assassination of Kenya's month-old post-election crisis, began in front of his house on a street of squared hedges and high gates. Mourners gathered there by the hundreds until police arrived and fired tear gas. The scene turned into an angry, tire-burning demonstration.

The anger spread quickly to a vast slum a few blocks away, where Evans Silingi, a shop owner from the Luo tribe of opposition leader Raila Odinga, soon picked up a heavy gray rock. "They have just killed the MP of Embakasi!" he shouted, referring to the district that elected Were last month. In the near distance stood several hundred machete-waving young men from President Mwai Kibaki's Kikuyu tribe.

News of Were's death spread by radio, TV and text message, fanning rage across the western towns of Naivasha and Eldoret. And in Kisumu, farther west, thousands of opposition supporters barricaded roads with bonfires, stopped buses and stoned a man to death.

"You started by killing us and now you're killing our leaders!" many demonstrators chanted in their mother tongue, according to a local reporter.

After weeks of violence by groups of anonymous young men, Were's death provided individual evidence of how volatile this once-stable East African nation has become since the Dec. 27 election. The opposition has accused Kibaki, the incumbent, of stealing the election. International observers found serious flaws in the vote tally.

Now Kenya's decades-old struggles over land, economic resources and political power are playing out as the election crisis appears to be worsening by the day. Kenya is a nation of 37 million people that, since its independence from British colonial rule in 1963, has had ethnic clashes before. But these are among the most severe.

With a cycle of revenge killings, the death toll has surpassed 850. More than 250,000 people have fled ethnically mixed areas in the west, turning Kenya into what increasingly appears to be a tribally segregated nation.

Even with former U.N. secretary general Kofi Annan in Nairobi to mediate between Kibaki and Odinga, many Kenyans say their country is just a spark away from blazing out of control.

For a while Tuesday, it appeared that the killing of Were, a 38-year-old lawmaker from Odinga's Orange Democratic Movement, might provide it.

Were was shot once in the head and once in the chest as he was pulling into his driveway, his security guard said. Police are investigating whether it was a robbery, but his supporters immediately called his death a political assassination.

Were was a hero in his district, a mostly poor neighborhood of dirt paths and corrugated-metal homes where he funded an orphanage and paid children's school fees. As a successful candidate for parliament, Were also embodied the hopes Odinga's followers had to win political power.