Protests erupted in western Kenya and machete-wielding mobs faced off in the Rift Valley on Monday after scores died in ethnic violence, complicating mediation efforts by former U.N. boss Kofi Annan.
In the normally peaceful Rift Valley town of Nakuru, a mortuary worker said on Monday that 64 corpses were lying in the morgue, all victims of the past four days of ethnic fighting.
Gangs from rival communities have been fighting each other with machetes, clubs, and bows and arrows in Nakuru and nearby Naivasha, both famous for their lakes teeming with wildlife.
In the worst incident of the latest flare-up, eight people were burned to death locked inside one house in Naivasha.
The violence since Kenya's Dec. 27 election has now gathered a momentum of its own - linked to decades-old land disputes, wealth inequalities and past British colonial rule - and pushed the total death toll beyond 800 people.
"It's very dangerous now. There seems to be much more of an organising hand behind it on all sides," Britain's Africa minister Mark Malloch Brown told the BBC on a visit to Kenya.
"This country is hurting. Its economy is way down."
The number of 250,000 refugees, from one of Kenya's darkest episodes since independence in 1963, looked sure to swell as thousands more fled the chaos in Naivasha and Nakuru.
In the pro-opposition western town of Kisumu on Monday, police fired teargas and bullets in the air as several thousand people took to the streets to complain about the deaths of members of their Luo ethnic community in the Rift Valley.
"Almost the whole of Kisumu is up in smoke," said Eric Odhiambo, a motorcycle taxi-driver. "People are mad at killings of Luo in Naivasha yesterday ... But there are so many rioters."
Residents said two protesters were shot dead.
The dispute over President Mwai Kibaki's re-election - which the opposition says was rigged - has plunged Kenya into a spiral of violence, battering its image as an east African trade and tourism hub and one of the continent's more stable nations.
