Nairobi - Suspected Ethiopian cattle rustlers shot dead four Kenyan police reservists in northern Kenya, bringing the death toll from such violence to seven since the weekend, police said on Tuesday.
They said the raiders attacked a village near the town if Lokitaung, about 40km south of the Kenyan-Ethiopian border, killing the victims overnight on Monday, they have said.
"They fled after shooting dead four officers," said Everette Wasike, the police commander for Kenya's central Rift Valley province, where the incident occurred.
At the weekend, authorities said another band of Ethiopian raiders attacked a border village in neighboring Eastern Province, killing three Kenyans whom they accused of being police informants.
The slain trio - a man and two women - were shot dead in the village of Sololo on Sunday by gunmen suspected of links with the Oromo Liberation Front, a rebel group in southern Ethiopia that broke with the government in 1995, police said.
Cattle rustling and revenge attacks are endemic in the region and have become worse in recent months due to the effects of a searing drought that killed tens of thousands of livestock and depleted already sparse water and pasture.
The latest killings brought to at least 150 the number of people killed in the volatile region in the past five months as longstanding tensions have intensified between the ethnic Borana of southern Ethiopia and Gabra of northern Kenya. - Sapa-AFP