Nairobi - Kenyan police and tax
authorities on Wednesday raided the office of a pro-democracy
organisation that has raised questions over preparations for
last week's disputed elections.
"They are outside the gates right now," Gladwell Otieno, the
executive director of Africa Centre for Open Governance
(AfriCOG), told Reuters by phone.
Incumbent President Uhuru Kenyatta won the August 8 election
by a margin of 1.4 million votes.
International and domestic
observers say the election process was largely free and fair but
opposition leader Raila Odinga has disputed the results.
Kenyan television showed pictures of the raid during which
civil society leaders challenged the search warrant.
Human
rights lawyer Maina Kiai asked why tax authorities had to bring
three vanloads of police.
"They say they have got a search warrant ... (but) the
search warrant does not name AfriCOG. The order does not specify
what they are coming to do," he said on television.
The raid follows letters from the government on Tuesday
accusing AfriCOG and another civil society organisation, the
Kenya Human Rights Commission (KHRC), of administrative and tax
violations.
The threats to shut the organisations, which played a
leading role in organising civil society to question and monitor
the elections, provoked condemnation from the United Nations and
international rights groups like Amnesty International and Human
Rights Watch.