At least 62 people, including 11 children and women, were massacred Tuesday night in Tana River and Mandera counties as the rest of the country and its security machinery slept.

The shocking killings that should stir the conscience of the nation and which included slashing of at least 300 cattle and in some cases burning of houses with the occupants inside were largely about pasture and water.

In Tana River, from where the Government has been getting worrying signs of imminent inter-ethnic bloodbath, 52 people were hacked to death or burnt alive, among them 11 children and 31 women. Some 100 houses were reduced to ashes, 300 head of cattle killed, and 1,000 people displaced in the Pokomo retaliation attack on the Orma.

It was here that in 2002 at least 100 people were butchered in the perennial Pokomo-Orma clashes over pastoralist and farming rivalry.

As President Kibaki last evening condoled with the bereaved and vowed stern action would be taken against the perpetrators of the two separate crimes. The question why the security team did nothing to forestall the attacks despite obvious signs a bloodbath rang loudly across the country.

Those who visited the scene of Tana River killings described scenes as similar to mass murders of the Great Lakes region, with mutilated bodies of children and women, old and young, strewn across homesteads, their blood caked on the ground, and flies flying all over.

The bodies of the children, killed while too young to even know what was happening, and why adults were on a killing spree, were particularly horrifying. It was a statement on the ferocity and senselessness of the rivalry between the two communities that share one common denominator – grinding rivalry.

The bodies of those killed in competition for scarce pasture and water were taken to a mosque in the remote Rekite village in the Tana Delta. Horrified residents reported raiders descended on their village with blazing guns, machetes and fire to burn, kill, and pillage.

The Standard reporters and aid workers at the scene described the scorched village 120km south of Hola, the county’s capital, of terrified villagers and a strong smell of human and animal flesh hanging around empty hulks of what until Wednesday was a thriving settlement of pastoralists.

“I have counted 40 corpses in the local mosque,” said a witness, who identified himself only as Bante. Bante said many of the victims had machete wounds on the head, limbs, and necks.

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