President Uhuru Kenyatta on Wednesday, June 9, set ablaze 5,144 guns at the Regional Police Traffic Training Centre in Ngong, Kajiado County.
The small fire arms had been given up by individuals voluntarily after a call from the state in an attempt to curb rising insecurity incidents across the country.
In the photos, the President is seen setting the two stacks on fire before watching with a satisfactory expression on his face as the bonfire formed.
"A majority of the illegal firearms were voluntarily surrendered by the public who heeded Government amnesty offers, and through the diligence of Kenya's security agencies," read a statement from State House.
This comes a day after Interior CS Fred Matiang'i noted that in under two years, the ministry had recovered over 14,000 guns that were held by the wrong people.
“Because we’ve become intensely materialistic, people are running money-laundering rackets that have been under cover for a very long time. In two years alone, we have collected close to 14,000 guns and over 400,000 bullets from wrong hands," noted Matiang'i.
During his speech, the CS aso announced a crackdown in Kenyan estates after recording a spike in 'wash wash' crime activities.
The CS noted that the spike in money-laundering activities, known as 'wash wash', was driven by individual's need to maintain expensive lifestyles.
Since 2019, the Ministry of Interior has urged Kenyans to surrender illegally held guns after insecurity cases spiked in various regions with Baringo being the most affected.
In September 2020, Matiang'i launched a cleanup process targeting illegal gun owners through restructuring gun laws.
Matiang'i affirmed, at the time, that he was restructuring the country's firearms licensing regime and urged illegal riffle holders to surrender their weapons.
In March 2020, Matiangi stated that authorities had seized 6,000 firearms, two months after destroying another haul of 8,000.
