Christians Under Attack

In broad daylight, a crowd of Kenyans set a church filled with hundreds of terrified families on fire and listened to them scream as flames engulfed them, according to witnesses including police and a Red Cross volunteer.

Those who escaped the building were hunted down with machetes; others hid inside pit latrines.

Up to 50 people were killed in the attack, said a Red Cross official who asked that her name — which would identify her tribe — not be published to protect her from reprisals. Even first aid workers were stopped by vigilante gangs who demanded their identity.

The attack Tuesday was the ugliest incident yet since last week's disputed elections unleashed a torrent of ethnic and political violence that has claimed at least 270 lives.

Kikuyu homes have been torched across the country, and Kikuyus have been targeted in tit-for-tat ethnic massacres. One of the dead was the nephew of George Karanja, whose family had sought sanctuary with around 2,000 other people in the Assemblies of God Church in Eldoret, about 300 kilometers (185 miles) west of Nairobi.

They had fled to the church on Monday night, seeking refuge after mobs began torching homes.

"In the morning, when the men were sleepy and some had gone to take a shower, we heard the first scream," recalled the 37-year-old Karanja. Many from his family — including his nephew, his wife's parents and his two children — were inside.

At least 2,000 raiders had arrived, he said.

"They started burning the church. The mattresses that people were sleeping on caught fire. There was a stampede, and people fell on one another," he said, his voice catching.

Karanja said he helped pull out at least 10 people, but "I could not manage to pull out my sister's son. He was screaming 'uncle, uncle'... He died."

He was 11.

Karanja said his two children were staying in the church with their grandparents. "They raised their hands when they were coming out of the church, and they were caned, but not killed.

"They hacked my father. He is a 90-year-old man. My sister is a widow."

By that time, the attackers had seen him saving people and began stoning him, he said. Karanja ran through an alley and slipped through a fence, managing to hide by submerging himself in a pit latrine outside the church property.

"One of my attackers was shouting that someone has gone inside the latrine, but they were too busy," he said. "The most hurtful thing was that I know some of them. I can even show you their businesses in town."

"I stayed in the latrine for about 30 minutes, then I heard people speak Kikuyu," said Karanja, also a Kikuyu.

"The worst part is that they were hacking people and then setting them on fire," he said. "I saw a burnt body arched with its legs stiff up in the air."

Video footage taken from a helicopter chartered by the Red Cross showed many homes in flames in Eldoret and the horizon obscured by smoke. Clusters of people could be seen seeking sanctuary at schools and the airport. Others were moving into the forest. Impromptu roadblocks with metal railings and rocks had been set up across the road every few hundred meters (yards).

Two government security officials who shot a suspect in the arson were lynched by a crowd after they tried to flee, a witness told The Associated Press. When they tried to escape by car, they were stopped at a roadblock and cut down by machetes as they as they ran. The witness asked not to be named to protect him from reprisals.

Ali-Amin Kimathi, the head of the Muslim Human Rights Forum, said the political protests had been hijacked by people wanting to settle old scores.

"An ethnic way of sorting these issues now scares us because now we are moving towards another Rwanda," he said.

Tuesday's scenes were reminiscent of Rwanda's 1994 genocide, in which hundreds of thousands of people were slaughtered, many of them in churches where they had sought refuge.

The violence in Kenya is expected to continue, as opposition leader Odinga has insisted he will go ahead with a rally on Thursday that the government has banned. Kibaki said he was willing to meet Odinga to discuss ways to end the violence, but Odinga said he would not talk until Kibaki admitted he was not Kenya's legitimate president.