标签： Africa

It has been 12 months since three Kenyan mourners were shot dead by police during a national state farewell for iconic former prime minister Raila Odinga, and a months-long investigation by BBC Africa Eye has upended the official narrative around the deadly incident.

Odinga, Kenya’s longest-serving opposition leader and one of the nation’s most consequential political figures, died at the age of 80 in October 2024 while receiving medical treatment in India. His death sparked an unprecedented outpouring of national grief, with thousands of Kenyans gathering to welcome his repatriated body at Nairobi’s Jomo Kenyatta International Airport. The funeral event was originally scheduled to host Odinga’s lying-in-state at Kenya’s parliament building, but an unexpected surge in crowd size and fears of a potential security breach forced organizers to relocate the memorial to Kasarani Stadium at the eleventh hour. Officials later acknowledged they had barely any time to secure the 48,000-capacity venue, leaving thousands of unvetted mourners to stream into the stands and onto the pitch without checks.

On the day of the memorial, 16 October 2024, mourners waited for hours in 30-degree Celsius heat with no functioning public address system to share updates. Tensions eventually boiled over in a small section near the VIP pavilion, where a group of attendees began throwing objects at police guarding the restricted area. As the crowd pushed toward the VIP section, officers opened fire with live ammunition. While most of the crowd across the stadium remained peaceful, three attendees were killed. Officials initially claimed the deceased were involved in the clash that triggered the gunfire.

But after reviewing more than 1,500 pieces of footage and photos from inside the stadium, and interviewing surviving family members of the victims, BBC Africa Eye has confirmed the three killed were nowhere near the confrontation. Forensic geolocation analysis places 40-year-old chef and father of seven Evans Kiche roughly 60 meters from the scuffle, where he suffered a fatal gunshot wound to the head. The other two victims – 36-year-old father of three Vincent Ogutu and 42-year-old Jidah Burka – were in the opposite stands, at least 160 meters away from the unrest, on the opposite side of the stadium. Autopsy reports confirm Ogutu was killed by a gunshot to the chest, while Burka suffered a fatal wound to the head.

Further analysis of footage tracked the shooters to a group of eight unmarked tactical officers, clad in military camouflage with covered faces and no visible unit insignia. Their uniforms, positioning and pre-shooting security protocols match the profile of the elite police unit assigned to protect Kenya’s sitting president and senior VIPs. At least three officers from this presidential protection unit fired their weapons during the incident, the BBC confirmed. While the outlet cannot definitively link specific bullets to each victim, it says the evidence strongly suggests the fatal shots came from this elite unit. The BBC also found no evidence that the objects thrown by the crowd included stones, contradicting official claims – video does confirm plastic chairs were thrown, however.

For Yvonne Akinyi, Ogutu’s widow, the finding offers little comfort, but answers the lingering questions that have haunted her for a year. Ogutu never planned to attend the memorial: he was in central Nairobi with friends when the group decided to join the crowd heading to the stadium on a whim. Within hours, he was dead, leaving Akinyi a young widow with three orphaned children. “The people we look to protect us, these are the people that cause us this pain,” Akinyi told the BBC. “There were so many people at Kasarani, why him? It leaves a hole deep inside that never goes away, even when I try to be strong for my children.”

Kenya’s Interior Minister Kipchumba Murkomen has defended police actions, telling the BBC officers showed “restrained” response to the unrest. He argued officers had worked nonstop for hours, were reassigned to the new venue at the last minute, and operated under extreme pressure, making split-second, on-the-ground judgment calls. “I don’t think anybody in command ordered officers to open fire; it was the judgment of the officer in the moment,” Murkomen said. He added that the independent police oversight body, the Independent Policing Oversight Authority (IPOA), is still conducting its own probe, and the government will take appropriate legal action once those findings are released.

One year on, however, no officer has been held accountable for the three deaths, and IPOA did not respond to the BBC’s request for comment on the Africa Eye investigation. The Kenya National Police Service acknowledged in a statement to the BBC that the incident has been a major learning experience for the force, adding that the lessons from the shooting will drive more professional, responsible use of force in future public events.

The families of the three victims continue to wait for accountability, as the investigation exposes deep gaps in Kenyan police accountability and crowd control protocols for high-profile national events.

A deadly air strike targeting civilian gold prospectors in a remote border area of Sudan has left at least 72 people dead, according to a regional human rights organization.

Khartoum-based rights group Emergency Lawyers confirmed that military jets struck informal artisanal miners at a busy gold mining location in Sudan’s Red Sea State on Saturday. As of Monday morning, neither Egypt’s government nor Sudan’s de facto ruling administration has issued a public response to the allegations of the attack.

This incident is not the first time Cairo has been accused of launching lethal strikes against gold prospectors along Egypt’s southern border with Sudan, as part of a broader campaign to curb cross-border illegal activity. Emergency Lawyers emphasized in a Sunday statement that these repeated alleged incursions violate Sudan’s territorial sovereignty, while also exposing the inability of Sudan’s current leadership to exert control over its border regions.

“The intentional targeting of unarmed, civilian prospectors directly contravenes international humanitarian law and the fundamental human right to life,” the group stated. “These actions may meet the legal definition of war crimes.” The organization added that the current death toll is considered provisional, and the final number of fatalities could climb as search and recovery efforts continue.

The Paris-based independent publication Sudan Tribune, which has long covered Sudanese affairs, reported that the actual death toll could be far higher than the figure shared by Emergency Lawyers. The outlet spoke with a survivor of Saturday’s attack, who confirmed that dozens more people were wounded in the strikes.

Eyewitness accounts shared with the newspaper detail that the assault began around 6:00 a.m. local time (4:00 a.m. GMT). The attacking aircraft launched more than five missiles directly at the makeshift miner encampments in the Shamal al-Wadi area, reducing the camps and active excavation pits to rubble while workers were still inside the pits.

This latest incident follows similar allegations reported in June, when Sudanese sources claimed Egyptian forces deployed drones and artillery to target artisanal mining sites in this same border region, killing multiple prospectors. Prior to that June incident, Egyptian border guards had been involved in repeated lower-level confrontations, including burning miners’ excavation equipment, destroying temporary makeshift shelters, and firing live rounds to disperse workers from the border zone.

Shortly after the June allegations surfaced, Egypt’s border authority confirmed that it had launched a large-scale joint security operation with the Egyptian military along the shared border with Sudan. The stated goal of the operation was to disrupt three key cross-border criminal activities: illegal migration, drug trafficking, and unauthorized gold mining.

For its part, Sudan’s de facto leadership launched an official investigation into the alleged June strikes, which were reported to have killed dozens of civilian prospectors at that time.

Gold mining has become a flashpoint for rising cross-border tensions between the two nations in recent years, particularly amid Sudan’s ongoing civil conflict that broke out in 2023. The widespread instability caused by the civil war has led to a massive surge in unregulated artisanal gold mining across the country. This informal mining practice relies on basic hand tools, is done without official government permits, and disproportionately takes place in remote, ungoverned border regions.

Many of the most gold-rich deposits in the area are located along the unpatrolled, porous border between Sudan and Egypt, in terrain that has long been used for cross-border smuggling routes. Unregulated gold extracted by artisanal miners is often trafficked across these borders through existing smuggling networks. In June alone, Egypt’s border forces announced they had seized 86 tonnes of illegally mined gold ore along with hundreds of pieces of unauthorized prospecting equipment.

Unregulated artisanal mining has continued to operate uninterrupted in Sudan’s active conflict zones, and there are widespread reports that smuggled Sudanese gold generates critical revenue for armed opposition groups operating in the border regions. This has created growing concern in Cairo that large volumes of illicit Sudanese gold are entering the Egyptian market, undercutting legal, regulated domestic gold trade.

A correction was issued by the original reporting outlet on October 12, clarifying that the strike location was misidentified as River Nile state in early reports, and has been corrected to Red Sea state.

A devastating maritime tragedy off the northern coast of Djibouti has claimed the lives of at least 139 migrants – 15 of whom are children – and left dozens more unaccounted for, the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration (IOM) has confirmed. The incident unfolded late Thursday near Obock, a key coastal port town in Djibouti, when a crowded vessel carrying 305 migrants capsized mid-journey from Djibouti to Yemen. Rescue operations have so far pulled 82 survivors from the water, according to the IOM.

In the days following the disaster, the IOM revised its initial death toll of 109 upward after search teams recovered 30 additional bodies from the surrounding waters. Calling the incident a catastrophic loss of human life, Alexandre Coissac, IOM’s mission chief in Djibouti, emphasized that the tragedy serves as a stark warning of the constant, lethal risks that vulnerable migrants take when they set out in search of safer, more stable lives abroad. “Our thoughts are with the survivors and the families who have lost loved ones or remain without news of their relatives,” Coissac said.

All 82 survivors are Ethiopian nationals, and local government authorities have worked alongside aid organizations to provide them with immediate access to medical care. The IOM is currently hosting 64 of the survivors at its dedicated response center in Obock, where it offers not only healthcare but also support to reconnect survivors with their family members back home. Local officials have also stepped in to coordinate burial arrangements for those who died in the shipwreck.

The deadly capsizing is part of a growing crisis along one of the world’s most dangerous migration routes, which sees tens of thousands of people from the Horn of Africa undertake the perilous crossing every year. Driven by crushing poverty, widespread regional insecurity, and the accelerating harmful impacts of climate change, migrants continue to brave the Bab el-Mandeb Strait to reach Yemen, despite the country being mired in a devastating civil war that has stretched on for more than a decade. Thousands of Yemenis have themselves fled the ongoing conflict between Houthi fighters and the Saudi-backed Yemeni government to seek safety in Djibouti, and the UN refugee agency confirmed last month that the war has displaced more than 130,000 people across Yemen to date.

Recent migration tracking data highlights the sharp escalation of movement through the region. Since September 10 alone, the IOM’s Displacement Tracking Matrix has recorded more than 20,000 individual population movements from Ethiopia to Djibouti, as migrants prepare to attempt the crossing to Yemen en route to eventual resettlement in Gulf countries, where they hope to find formal employment and greater safety.

Statistics from the IOM show that fatalities along this route are rising in tandem with increasing migration attempts. In 2025, more than 900 migrants died or went missing while crossing this stretch of water, marking an 18% increase in deaths compared to previous periods, as the number of people attempting the journey also grew. This is not the first fatal incident this year: a similar shipwreck in March 2026 left nine people dead and another 45 missing.

The IOM added that it remains in close collaboration with Djibouti’s local authorities to deliver ongoing aid to migrants affected by the tragedy, while working to implement longer-term measures to prevent further loss of life both at sea and along overland migration routes. Djibouti, a small former French colony located just across the Gulf of Aden from Yemen, has become a major transit point for migrants moving from the Horn of Africa toward the Middle East in recent years.

A devastating drone attack carried out by Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF) on a displaced persons camp in the country’s Blue Nile state, which shares a border with Ethiopia, has left at least 41 people dead, according to a Sudanese human rights organization, Emergency Lawyers.

The targeted strike hit the Abu Shandi displacement camp on Friday, marking the latest escalation of violence in Sudan’s ongoing 18-month power struggle between the national army and the RSF paramilitary group.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has publicly voiced its horror at the deeply troubling reports coming out of the region. Initial on-the-ground assessments confirm that the overwhelming majority of those killed and injured in the attack are women and children – a detail that has drawn widespread international condemnation.

Sudan’s brutal civil conflict erupted in April 2023, when tensions between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the RSF boiled over into open warfare over competing claims to state control. To date, the violence has claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, forced more than 14 million Sudanese to flee their homes, and created what global aid organizations describe as one of the most severe humanitarian catastrophes on the planet today. Millions of residents across the country now lack consistent access to basic life-saving services, including emergency medical care.

Current territorial control is split between the two warring factions: the national army holds sway over most of Sudan’s central and eastern provinces, while the RSF maintains its headquarters in the western region of Darfur and also controls significant swathes of territory in the country’s south. Independent human rights monitors have documented repeated drone strikes by both sides of the conflict, with civilian population centers and displacement camps regularly bearing the brunt of the violence.

In its official statement, OCHA added that the Abu Shandi area, which was hit in Friday’s attack, has already endured weeks of constant bombardment. This sustained violence has already displaced thousands of additional civilians in the region and left countless more vulnerable to extreme harm, as aid groups struggle to reach affected communities with critical supplies.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee has awarded the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize to 85-year-old Navi Pillay, a former United Nations human rights chief and veteran international judge from South Africa, honoring her decades-long work advancing global peace and the rule of international law. The committee recognized Pillay for laying the foundation for a more inclusive, comprehensive global legal order, highlighting her instrumental work in ensuring accountability for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. Born to a bus driver in a segregated, low-income Indian neighborhood of Durban during South Africa’s apartheid era, Pillay blazed a trail for women and people of color in law: she became the first woman to open a private law practice in Natal Province in 1967, and later the first non-white woman appointed to South Africa’s High Court. Over her 60-year career, Pillay has built a global reputation investigating and prosecuting human rights violations in some of the world’s most volatile conflict zones, including Rwanda, Myanmar, and the Occupied Palestinian Territory. She served as president of the UN-backed International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, which oversaw prosecutions for the 1994 Rwandan genocide that killed an estimated 800,000 people, was elected to the International Criminal Court in 2003, and most recently chaired the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory from 2021 to 2025. That three-member commission found that Israel had committed acts of genocide in Gaza and that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant incited genocide through their public statements. The commission also found that Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups committed war crimes during the October 7, 2023 attacks that killed roughly 1,200 people and took 251 hostages, and additionally accused Israel of committing war crimes in Gaza. While the commission had no formal legal authority to enforce its findings, its conclusions drew fierce pushback from Israel, which rejected the findings and accused the panel of acting as proxies for Hamas. That criticism has carried over to Pillay’s Nobel award: on Friday, Israel’s Foreign Ministry issued a statement calling the award a “grotesque weaponization of an award to legitimise anti-Israel hatred and prejudice.” U.S. President Donald Trump, who has previously stated he wants the Nobel Peace Prize, reposted a social media post claiming the Nobel Committee had “demeaned” the prize by awarding it to an “unabashed hater of America and Israel.” Just days after the award announcement, the U.S. implemented sweeping new sanctions against the International Criminal Court, citing a goal of restricting the court’s resources and ability to operate – a move the ICC called an assault on the rule of law. Nobel Committee chair Jørgen Watne Frydnes pushed back on claims the award was a political statement on the Gaza conflict, emphasizing that Pillay received the prize for her entire body of work, not just her findings on Gaza. Pillay first heard the news of her award while at Nuremberg’s Palace of Justice, where she is currently serving as a judge in the International Court of Justice case brought by The Gambia against Myanmar, accusing the country of genocide against the Rohingya Muslim minority. Myanmar has denied the allegations, calling the genocide claims unsubstantiated. When told she had won, Pillay initially joked, “it must be a joke,” before quipping to the crowd gathered to applaud her, “If you clap a little bit more I may share this prize with Trump,” a reference to last year’s winner, Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, who gave her medal to Trump in January to recognize his commitment to freedom. Pillay dedicated her award to “all the survivors of international crimes” and to international justice practitioners “whose compassion and courage continue to ensure that impunity will not be allowed to reign.” Global leaders and human rights organizations have broadly praised the award. UN human rights chief Volker Turk said the award reaffirms that “human rights, the rule of law and justice, and accountability are fundamental to everything, to peace, to security, and prosperity.” UN Secretary General António Guterres called Pillay “a steadfast, independent voice of justice amidst some of the most historic international legal cases of our time.” South African President Cyril Ramaphosa noted that Pillay, who got her start defending anti-apartheid activists in her home country, has spent her career “upholding human dignity and bring hope in South Africa and to peoples globally.” Amnesty International Secretary General Agnès Callamard, who was with Pillay when she learned of the award, called it an “inspired choice,” noting that “at a time when both international law and justice are under attack, when too many states attempt to hollow them out, her Nobel Peace Prize could not come at a better time.” With the award, Pillay becomes South Africa’s fifth Nobel Peace Prize winner, following in the footsteps of iconic anti-apartheid leaders Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu.

Two weeks after renewed violence erupted between Ethiopia’s federal government and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), a long-simmering rift between Ethiopia and neighboring Eritrea has exploded into open armed conflict, raising urgent fears of a wider regional conflict. The crisis comes on the heels of a broken 2022 peace deal that ended a two-year civil war in Tigray, and marks a dramatic reversal of the brief diplomatic detente between the two Horn of Africa nations that began in 2018.

In a formal letter dated October 8, addressed to the United Nations Security Council and obtained by the BBC, Ethiopian Foreign Minister Gedion Timothewos has formally accused Eritrea of launching an “all-out invasion” of Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region. Timothewos called the incursion a “blatant act of aggression”, adding that Ethiopia is left with no choice but to exercise its inherent UN-guaranteed right to self-defense against the violation of its sovereign territory. According to the Ethiopian foreign minister, Eritrean military forces have pushed as far as 60 kilometers (37 miles) into Tigray, a depth of advance that has stunned regional observers.

The accusation marks a sharp break from the dynamics of the 2020–2022 Tigray civil war, when Eritrea fought as a key military ally of the Ethiopian federal government against the TPLF. Relations between the two neighbors have collapsed rapidly in recent months, driven primarily by tensions over Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s stated ambition to secure access to one of Eritrea’s strategic Red Sea ports. Diplomatic ties between the two nations were formally severed just last week, opening the door for further escalation.

In response to Ethiopia’s claims, Eritrean Information Minister Yemane Gebremeskel has rejected the accusations outright, framing Ethiopia as the aggressor in the crisis. Gebremeskel dismissed Addis Ababa’s claims as “duplicity in their most extreme forms”, and countered that Ethiopia has launched an “unprovoked war of aggression” against Eritrea. He also accused Ethiopian leaders of actively seeking to foment regime change in Asmara by providing shelter and logistical support to Eritrean opposition mercenary groups. Eritrea seceded from Ethiopian control in 1993 after a decades-long independence struggle, and relations between the two countries have been fraught with border disputes and political tension for most of the past 30 years, with a brief normalization period beginning when Abiy took office in 2018.

Amid the escalating cross-border tensions, Ethiopian drone strikes have targeted Eritrean military positions in the border town of Adigrat, located in northern Tigray, according to multiple independent reports. US-based conflict analytics organization Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (Acled) confirmed that multiple drone strikes hit Eritrean troop deployments and ammunition stockpiles in Adigrat overnight this week. Multiple local witnesses, speaking to AFP, confirmed heavy drone activity, with one reporting “many, many drone strikes” and confirming that several Eritrean military supply trucks were destroyed in the attacks. Following the strikes, witnesses reported that Eritrean ground forces appeared to be retreating north toward the Eritrean border. As of Friday, there are no independently verified reports of civilian or military casualties from the strikes, and the BBC has confirmed it cannot deploy independent journalists to report from Tigray due to security restrictions.

The current upsurge in violence follows months of rising political tension across northern Ethiopia. In September, the TPLF joined a new coalition of armed opposition groups opposed to the Abiy government, setting the stage for renewed fighting. Just last week, TPLF forces withdrew from Mekelle, Tigray’s largest regional capital, leaving the city under the control of Ethiopian federal government forces, which retook control of the key population center after the rebel withdrawal.

In its formal letter to the UN Security Council, Ethiopia appealed to the international body for backing, saying “In this time of difficulty, when Ethiopia is left with no other option but to defend itself, we count on your understanding, support, and solidarity.” International observers have warned that the open clash between Ethiopia and Eritrea could destabilize the entire Horn of Africa region, drawing in neighboring powers and undoing the fragile progress made towards peace in Tigray after the 2022 ceasefire agreement.