Nairobi, Kenya - At least five people were killed when vicious gang warfare erupted in a Kenyan slum between a banned cult accused of criminal ties and a group known locally as the "Taliban," police said on Tuesday.
Police shot dead two members of the so-called Mungiki sect late on Monday as they roamed Nairobi's Mathare shantytown seeking revenge for the deaths of three of their colleagues hacked to death by the Taliban earlier, they said.
"Three people were hacked to death by bandits last night, while our forces killed two gangsters who opened fired at them," national police spokesperson Gideon Kibunja said.
He said fighting between the two sides first erupted on Sunday over a dispute involving protection rackets for illicit brewing cartels that operate in the Mathare slum on Nairobi's eastern outskirts.
The Mungiki are a shadowy politico-religious group with alleged ties to Kenya's 1950s pre-independence Mau Mau uprising and blamed for a string of recent murders and violent robberies around the east African nation.
The Taliban were formed in Kenya's western city of Kisumu in the 1990s and are reputed to organise political violence but have no religious affiliation, unlike the Afghan Islamic fundamentalist group from which they took their name.