The Independent Policing Oversight Authority has opened investigations into police brutality in Huruma, Nairobi.
The authority’s investigators interviewed the family of a two-month-old baby girl teargassed in her parents’ house in Kiamaiko on Friday night.
She is still under medication with breathing complications and nose bleeding.
The teargas exploded inside her parents’ house on second floor of a residential flat as her father attempted to throw it out.
The investigators received the teargas canister lobbed into Shamsu Abdikadir’s house where his infant suffocated.
Abdikadir was inside his house with family when the teargas can landed in his house. His daughter had fainted by the time he located and threw it out.
“She has been discharged but I have been visiting the hospital regularly because of the occasional mild nose bleeding that has persistent,” Abdikadir said at Kiamaiko Social Justice Centre.
“This incident has changed my daughter’s life. She is experiencing regular shocks and is in and out of hospital because bleeding caused by police’s careless action,” he added before breaking down.
IPOA officers also received complaints from human rights defenders on rising cases of extrajudicial executions, torture and forced disappearances.
Kiamaiko social justice centre official Rahma Waqo said police officers on patrol around 7:45 pm to enforce curfew when they encountered boda boda riders and a chase ensued before one of the officers lobbed a teargas canister into Abdikadir’s house.
She called for speedy investigations into the incident to accord the minor justice and stop the police brutality.
Waqo and the IPOA officials and other rights activists accompanied Abdikadir to the station where he was to record statement with police over the incident.
Nairobi County and Starehe police commanders Philip Ndolo and Alice Kimeli did not answer calls to respond to the brutality reports.
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