Kenyan Mp Shot Dead As Election Violence Continues

An opposition MP has been killed in the Rift Valley, local media reported today, as negotiators for opposing sides in Kenya's election dispute met for the first time.

David Kimutai Too was shot dead in the Rift Valley town of Eldoret, the second MP from the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) to be killed this week, the party said.

"He has been shot dead, by a traffic policeman in Eldoret, we think. The circumstances are very unclear. This crisis is just getting deeper every day," an ODM spokesman, Tony Gachoka, told Reuters.

Kenyan police said the fatal shooting by a policeman was a "crime of passion" and had already led to one arrest.

But the head of the ODM, Raila Odinga, called the death a politically-motivated "execution".

Earlier this week, Mugabe Were was shot outside his house in a suburb of the capital, Nairobi. Over 800 people have died in the violence that erupted after the disputed re-election of Mwai Kibaki as president a month ago.

In Nairobi, six negotiators - three representing Kibaki and three representing the opposition leader, Raila Odinga - were meeting under the mediation of former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan.

"The mood is serious. They can feel the weight of the nation on their shoulders," said a spokesman for Annan, Nasser Ega-Musa.

Odinga has said he wants a new election, while Kibaki has made clear he will not negotiate his position as president. Annan has said it could take a month to resolve the immediate dispute over the election, and a year to deal with long-standing ethnic animosities and land disputes underlying the violence.

On the sidelines of the African Union summit in Addis Ababa, US envoy Jenday Frazer said neither Kibaki nor Odinga was doing enough to halt the violence and that the US was reviewing possible cuts to its hundreds of millions of dollars in aid.

Much of the violence has pitted other tribes, including Odinga's Luo, against Kibaki's Kikuyu people. Kikuyus, Kenya's largest ethnic group, have long been the focus of resentment for their dominance of Kenya's economy and politics.

Frazer said the violence she saw during a visit earlier this month to the western Rift Valley pitted the Kalenjin, who support Odinga, against Kikuyus.

The Rift Valley was the traditional home of the Kalenjin and Masai people, when British colonialists seized large tracts of land for farming. When the land was redistributed after independence in 1963, then-president Jomo Kenyatta gave out most of the land to his Kikuyu people, instead of returning it to the Kalenjin and Masai.