(Corrects to add dropped word “range” in first paragraph)
NAIROBI (Reuters) -A man shot at point blank range by a Kenyan police officer during protests in the capital Nairobi against extrajudicial killings by security forces is alive but in intensive care, his father said on Wednesday.
Protests broke out in Nairobi and Kenya’s second-largest city, Mombasa, on Tuesday over the death of blogger and teacher Albert Ojwang in police custody on June 8.
A video posted on Kenyan broadcaster Citizen Television’s X account on Tuesday showed two policemen repeatedly striking a man – subsequently identified as Boniface Kariuki – on the head before one of them fired at him with a long-barrelled gun as he tried to walk away.
Police said late on Tuesday an officer had been arrested in connection with the shooting.
On Wednesday, the victim’s father Jonah Kariuki said the 22-year-old was in the intensive care unit at the government-funded Kenyatta National Hospital in Nairobi.
“He is on machine support,” Kariuki said in a video posted on X by The Standard newspaper. “I have seen he has a heartbeat … I have some hope.”
A Reuters journalist saw the young man on the ground on Tuesday with a heavily bleeding head wound, his hand clutching a packet of face masks.
“He was selling masks, it’s not that he is a criminal. I have never heard him steal,” Kariuki said.
The death of 31-year-old blogger Ojwang stoked anger over long-standing accusations of extrajudicial killings by security forces in the east African country.
Police had initially attributed his death to suicide, but apologised after an independent autopsy found that his wounds were the result of assault.
President William Ruto, too, said Ojwang had died “at the hands of the police”.
Human rights groups, the Law Society of Kenya and the judiciary have expressed concern at the increased incidents of alleged police brutality.
(Reporting by Vincent Mumo, Edwin Okoth and Humphrey Malalo; Writing by Elias Biryabarema; Editing by Ammu Kannampilly and Alex Richardson)
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