The images were posted by Kenyan activist Boniface Mwangi on 13 December 2014.
This X (formerly Twitter) post with images purportedly showing Kenyan police assaulting a protester during a stand-off with the residents in the Kware area of Mukuru Kwa Njenga is false.
The image shows a police officer seemingly stepping on the neck of an individual while other police officers watch.
The image is accompanied by the text:“Breaking news:if this post appears on your timeline kindly retweet. This are pictures from the quarry yesterday.This police have an inhumane act.Let us expose them them this is totally unacceptable (sic).”
The images, which also appear here, were claimed to be of the police assaulting a protester in the Kware(quarry) area. The post claims that the image was captured on 12 July 2024.
The images were shared after a section of the area residents had a stand-off with the police following the discovery of bodies dumped in the quarry. Following the unrest at the quarry, police were deployed to scatter the protesters.
But is the image an accurate depiction of the situation on 12 July 2024?
A Yandex image search of one of the images reveals that it was shared online before the July 2024 protests at the quarry. The images in the post under our investigation date back to 2014 and were shared by Kenyan activist Boniface Mwangi.
In another post dated 24 April 2017, Mwangi posted the photo showing the police dog attacking the man to liken leaders he called “tribal “ to dogs.
Mwangi also shared the photos in 2020 noting that the Kenyan police “have always been brutal.” In the March 2020 post, the activist also acknowledged that the pictures were from his archive.
Therefore, Lake Region Bulletin has established that an X post with images purportedly showing a Kenyan police assaulting a protester during a stand-off with the residents in the Kware area of Mukuru Kwa Njenga is false.
This fact-check was produced by Lake Region Bulletin, under the African Fact-Checking Incubator programme, with support from PesaCheck, Code for Africa’s fact-checking initiative, and the African Fact-Checking Alliance(AFCA).
