Some inmates at Kenya’s Kamiti Maximum Security Prison on Thursday evening staged riots and hunger strike over alleged new
punitive measures introduced by prison warders.
Amateur footage posted on social media showed a few prisoners shouting from roof tops, while another video showed what seemed to be anti-riot personnel repressing the riot.
The prisoners say they have been victimised following the escape of the three terror convicts even as they pleaded with the authorities to be lenient with them.
The prisoners demanded an end to new punitive measures introduced by authorities following a November escape by three inmates.
The incident in which three convicts escaped led to the sack of Wycliffe Ogalo as the Commissioner-General of the Kenya Prisons Service.
The three convicts are Musharaf Abdalla, who was convicted of attempting to attack the parliament in 2012; Joseph Juma Odhiambo, who was arrested in 2019 for planning to join the terror group al-Shabab; and Mohamed Abdi Abikar, who was convicted over his role in al-Shabab’s attack on Garissa University in April 2015.
Sources say, the prisoners alleged being locked inside their cells all through the day and night.
In March last year, Interior minister Fred Matiang’i proposed the relocation of Kamiti Prison from its current site to a location further from the capital.