Panafrican News Agency
13 November 2000
Nairobi, Kenya — Kenya police has arrested 34 students from an all-boys high school in central Kenya after they raided a neighbouring co-education school Saturday night, the East African Standard reported Monday.
Kenya's oldest daily said the violent incident occurred in Nyahururu, about 250 km north-west of Nairobi, and shocked the local community. It left scores of students from both Nyahururu Boys' High and Nyahururu Secondary Schools injured.
The marauding boys were said to have gone on a drinking and marijuana-smoking spree before storming the girls' dormitories on a rape mission.
But as most of the girls were not yet asleep, they screamed and raised an alarm. Their male colleagues, who had been watching a video show in a nearby recreation room, were goaded into action by the girls' shouts for help.
Armed with machetes, shovels and all types of crude weapons and joined by the girls, they charged at the interlopers.
In the ensuing battle, about 30 students were injured, among them girls.
In took the intervention of a contingent of administration police to quell the riot by firing into the air to scare away the marauding students.
The injured students from both sides were rushed to the local district hospital, where a number were admitted and the others treated and discharged.
The battle left shattered windowpanes, broken furniture and trampled-upon flower gardens and blood splattered surfaces.
"This was a well conceived and executed operation," a senior teacher at the mixed school said.
"The invaders were dressed in our uniform, which they had stolen from our school the previous Thursday night. We suspect they had planned to rape our girls," he added.
They are at least 34 boys from Nyahururu Boys' High School still in police custody. Among these are 30 candidates currently writing the Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education examination.
But the police and the school were non-committal on what would become of the candidates.
The police told PANA by telephone that most of the boys had gone into hiding since the incident and that they were hunting them down.
One boy was arrested in a drunken stupor at the mixed school on the night of the raid, while another was nabbed the following morning at the district hospital after being taken there with serious head injuries by the school night guard.
The arrest of the other 32 students followed an identification parade mounted by police at the 600-strong boys' school Sunday.
Those with fresh scratches or other wounds were instantly arrested. But the parade excluded almost half of the school as the others, fearing identification, had disappeared into the nearby plantations.
The local press quoted the local parents as describing Nyahururu Boys' High School as "a terror unit where students had become a law unto themselves."
Cases of students from one school invading another to settle some old score has been on the rise in Kenya in the last 10 years. The worst occurred at St. Kizito, a co-ed Secondary School in central Kenya in 1992, in which the boys raided the girls' dormitories and went in an orgy of rape and destruction of property.
Nineteen girls perished in the melee.
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