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Major Emmanuel Chirchir, Kenya's military spokesman. Photo | FILE |
By ABDI LATIF DAHIRPosted Thursday, January 12 2012 at 11:34
Kenya’s military spokesman has taken responsibility for posting old photographs which allegedly showed the stoning of a Kenyan by Al-Shabaab militants in Somalia on Tuesday.
Major Emmanuel Chirchir however insisted that an execution did take place on Tuesday and hinted that another two executions were likely to take place on Friday afternoon after the story went viral.
"I hear you, I take responsibility,” Maj Chirchir wrote on Twitter. "But hey let's condemn [sic] such acts past, present or future."
An American journalist exposed that the photos posted by the spokesperson on the social site Twitter were actually taken in 2009. The four graphic photos showed a man buried to his chest in the ground.
The photos then show masked men hurling stones at the man, after which they removed his dead body from the ground.
Maj Chirchir stated that the man was a Kenyan from Nairobi, and was stoned to death in the port city of Kismayu in southern Somalia on Tuesday. "Dead after being stoned… Recruit Kenyan kill them if you differ on opinion,” he wrote on his Twitter account.
Propaganda
However, Mr Mukhtar Ibrahim, a Somali-American freelance journalist based in Minnesota, on his Twitter account revealed that the photos were not taken in Kismayu, Somalia, but were instead taken in 2009.
"This photo is simply for propaganda purpose, major,” Mr Ibrahim wrote on Twitter. “This guy was stoned in 2009, not in 2012.”
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