A 4-year-old girl is thanking an unpredictable motorbike incident for saving her from the jaws of death after bandits wiped out her entire family on Tuesday, evening, January 9.
The minor was among the pillion passengers and a rider (suspected to be the father) who were ambushed by the armed men as they were en route to a pass-out ceremony of recently circumcised initiates in Baringo County.
Among the other passengers were his mother and three-year-old brother who did not survive the heinous attack which caught security forces in the bandit-prone region flatfooted.
As the four were a kilometre away from the venue, the bandits popped up from their hideout and opened fire on them. Luckily, the four-year-old girl fell off the motorbike onto the roadside, narrowly escaping the bullets that whizzed by.
Later on, passers-by and emergency service providers who rushed to the scene found the girl crying while curled up, yet to fathom the magnitude of the incident and how lucky, yet heartbroken, she was.
Her family members were scattered across the road, lying in a pool of blood. The father had died on the spot, while the mother and three-year-old brother succumbed to gunshot injuries at a local hospital.
Well-wishers who responded to the scene took the girl home where she was placed under the care of her extended family.
“We are being sent away with our children. We leave our homes not knowing where we shall go. When you decide to come back to your home you are met with bullets,” one lady lamented.
“In the past, women and children were never targeted in war... these ones have killed even a child and left one orphaned,” another resident lamented.
Two more people were also gunned down in a similar fashion at Natan in Kagir by bandits on Tuesday, bringing the death toll of January bandit attacks to five.
The armed men were said to have laid an ambush on the two men believed to be Police Reservists and killed them on the spot in retaliation against the police who reportedly killed five of their gang members in a security operation.
