On 14-5-2019 the City Cotton community suffered again another illegal eviction .

The Powers that Be

After several previous attacks, Kenya Police officers together with Kenyan government officials backed up hired gangsters to kick the residents again out of their housings, in an adjacent area called ‘Kismayu’. They claimed that the people were residing on land belonging to Wilson airport, which is nearby.
As this was not the first time that they attacked the community, the residents had gone earlier to court which granted a stopping order to them, instructing the Kenya Police and the Kenyan government to refrain from any eviction as long as the case would be in court.
The community had presented allotment letters by the Kenyan government and other documents to court which stated that they were the rightful residents and users of the land.

The stopping order was in place at the time of the eviction, rendering the whole police operation illegal. The allotment letter and stopping order were presented to the police officers in charge when the eviction started, though the officers decided to break the law they pledged to hold up & defend.
The situation was again warlike, with complete families with small children & old people being kicked out with brute violence.
No media or NGO dared to report about it, despite it happening in the middle of Nairobi.

RxAxLxF dared to go there to document the situation and was arrested on 18th May 2019 by the very police officers involved in the illegal operation. Though the police did not want to call it an arrest. When RxAxLxF asked ‘So if I am not arrested, I am free to go?’, he was told he was not.
He realized that’s how a ‘non-prisoner’ imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay must feel.

Once in police custody, the charges against him went up and up. From ‘Abetting a Crime’ (helping others to commit a crime), he was in the end accused of ‘Terrorism’. Though, instead of securing the evidence on his camera to use it in the Anti-Terror court case against him, the police officers took his camera by force away from him and did a deep level format on the memory card of his camera.

Seems that the police rather had the opinion that whatever was recorded on his camera should not be seen by anybody in this world, instead of bringing RxAxLxF for years into prison. One officer was so nice to tell him, that if he ever sees anything of this material on a screen, ‘they will come and take RxAxLxF out’.

After 1 day in detention, a lawyer from the Kenyan Katiba Institute paid for by Amnesty International got him out of custody. All charges were dropped against him, as RxAxLxF’s work is also in Kenya protected by the Constitution. It’s called Freedom of Press.

See a fragment of his material which was deleted by the Kenya Police officers here:

RxAxLxF filming his arrest by the police officers who conducted the illegal police operation in City Cotton/Kismayu.
The video is recovered from subsequent forced deletion by the officers and therefore with a bit of disturbed audio.