Thirteen people have been killed in clashes between Kenyan Somali sub-clans in northeastern Kenya and four others are missing, a government official and witnesses said Tuesday.
The clashes between the Aulia and Abduwak sub-clans took place Sunday and Monday near the district capital, Garissa, about 300kms east of the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, District Commissioner Salim Ali Mola said.
Mola said trouble started when the Adbuwak fighters raided an Aulian village Sunday and shot dead seven people. In retaliation, the Aulians on Monday ambushed a vehicle owned by an Abduwak and shot dead six passengers.
Witnesses, who spoke on condition their names not be used, told reporters in Garissa that four people were missing after the Aulian village was attacked.
Most of the inhabitants of northeastern Kenya are ethnic Somalis, who trace their ancestry to six main clans.
District police chief Alfonse Kalume said security personnel have been reinforced in an attempt to stop the fighting which has claimed about 60 lives from both sub-clans in the past five months.
Kalume said 50 people were arrested in connection with the latest clashes which have been blamed on rivalry over scarce grazing land because of a severe drought.
Herders in the Horn of Africa and northern Kenya have traditionally fought over water and grazing land, but the availability of cheap automatic weapons due to various wars in the region has made the clashes much more deadly today.
President Daniel arap Moi has closed Kenya's border with Somalia in an attempt to stanch the flow of weapons from the country that has had no central government since President Mohamed Siad Barre was ousted in 1991 and the country disintegrated into fiefdoms rotected by clan militias.
Three local legislators, including one from Moi's ruling Kenya African National Union party, have accused Kenyan security forces of mistreating innocent people in their efforts to end the fighting.
"The government knows very well those behind the killings and should stop arbitrary arrests of women and children," Mohammed Khalif of the opposition Forum for the Restoration of Democracy, or FORD party, said Tuesday.
Sapa-AP
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