Gang kills 27 in central Kenya

The Mungiki gang, notorious for beheading and mutilating victims, is Kenya's version of the mafia and is involved in extortion and racketeering rings, protection fees, kidnapping and murder, police say.

"The number of those dead has risen to 28 people. We have arrested 62 people," police spokesman Eric Kiraithe told Reuters.

He said only one of the dead was a member of the proscribed criminal gang. The others were village men who responded to calls of help from one of their own.

The attack was near Karatina, a town in the Nyeri West district of tea and coffee-producing central Kenya, some 100 km (60 miles) from the capital Nairobi.

"People in this village had collectively agreed that they didn't want Mungiki members in their village. Mungiki set the house of one of their leaders on fire last night and he screamed for help," Kiraithe said.

Gang members then waylaid the men who came to help and killed them one by one, he said.

Internal Security Minister George Saitoti said communities were tired of extortion and were fighting back against the gang.

In the past few weeks, villagers in other parts of central province have lynched suspected Mungiki members.

"What we have seen is that local people are not happy with the manner Mungiki have been terrorising them. People are coming out and expressing their anger," he told reporters. The Mungiki is drawn from the Kikuyu, Kenya's largest ethnic group and has links to politicians and powerful Kikuyu families. Two years ago police allegedly killed hundreds of its members in a crackdown in Kenya's capital.

The gang's size is unknown but it claims thousands of members, predominantly unemployed youths, some of whose communities were destroyed in tribal clashes in the 1990s.

(Reporting by Jack Kimball and Helen Nyambura-Mwaura; editing by Andrew Roche)