The Kenya National Focal Point on Small arms had claimed that there is new amnesty to illegal gun holders.
NAIROBI, Kenya, Sep 21- The Firearms Licencing Board has dismissed a report by the Kenya National Focal Point on Small arms, that there is new government amnesty on illegal gun holders.
The board’s chairman Samuel Mukindia told Capital FM News that “there is no such amnesty, the amnesty given already elapsed.”
“We are the sole government agency that handles anything to do with privately-owned guns,” he said, “so anyone else purporting to issue a new amnesty is misleading Kenyans.”
The Kenya National Focal Point On Small Arms and Light Weapons(KNFP) Director Mohamed Amin, had earlier said that a survey conducted by Africa Amnesty indicated that in Kenya, over 600,000 firearms are in the hands of civilians.
But Mukindia has dismissed these statistics.
“We do not have those statistics, we don’t know where they are getting them from,” he said.
“A recent survey shows that we have roughly 550,000 to 650,000 illegal firearms in the hands of ordinary citizens. As you are aware recently there was a review of civilian licensing. The government has already put measures of collecting those illegal guns from Kenyans,” Amin had told journalists at a briefing Saturday.
The call by the government to allow citizens to return illegal guns in the month of September without any punishment is in line with the decision of the African Union Heads of State Summit endorsing the observance of September as the Africa Amnesty Month for the surrender and collection of illegally owned weapons/arms.
In February this year, the government said it had vetted gun owners in a one-week exercise to ensure they had certificates of ownership.
By the time the vetting process was concluded, the government said it had introduced tough measures to regulate gun ownership in Kenya.
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