NAIROBI, Kenya Mar 12 – Interior Cabinet Secretary Kithure Kindiki has promised to reveal the identities of the financiers behind the bandits wreaking havoc in the northern part of the country.
Kindiki on Sunday disclosed that he has gathered enough intelligence pointing him to a “handful of senior commanders in charge of the bandit network as well as their spiritual leaders, political patrons, and the commercial beneficiaries of bandit gangs”.
“We know who they are, where they are, and how they are operating,” he said.
There have been arrests of some political leaders in the past in connection to the banditry menace. The courts however have released them either on bail or bond.
In the latest security measures to tame the bandits, Kindiki ordered
ordered the immediate vacation of residents living in 27 gorges, escarpments, caves, ravines, hills, and forests as part of the new security measures to tame banditry in the northern part of the country.
Kindiki subsequently gave the residents in the affected areas from Baringo, Laikipia, Samburu, West Pokot, and Turkana Counties 24 hours to immediately evacuate effective Sunday.
“I, therefore, declare these areas as scenes of crime, and we will treat any person found therein as a suspect of armed banditry, or as a suspect of aiding and abetting banditry, or as an accessory after the fact. Everyone must evacuate immediately,” Kindiki stressed.
Kindiki accordingly emphasized that the new measures aim to decisively deal with the bandits who persist in causing the deaths of innocent lives and loss of property.
“We are taking this war to their hideouts by land and air, with all our weight and might and with all the strength that God has given us to effectively defeat this lamentable catalog of crimes against humanity,” he said.
