The situation in Nairobi has escalated beyond anything the Foreign Office prepared for. Multiple sources on the ground confirm that a protest against a US-funded Ebola research facility has turned bloody. I’m looking at footage that hasn’t hit the wires yet: tear gas plumes over the Kibera slums, running battles with riot police, and a mob that has set fire to two vehicles bearing diplomatic plates. The British High Commission has just issued an emergency advisory: all non-essential staff and British aid workers are to leave immediately. This is not a drill.
The facility at the centre of the storm is the US Army Medical Research Unit-Kenya (USAMRU-K), a lab that has operated in the country for decades. Locals have long suspected it of being a front for bioweapons testing. Those suspicions have now boiled over. A leaked document I’ve obtained from a former employee shows that last year alone, the lab imported 14 vials of live Ebola virus from Sierra Leone. The Kenyan government has never officially acknowledged this.
I spoke to a protester who gave his name as James, a university student. His words: “They are using us as guinea pigs. We have seen the trucks with the red crosses. They are not for medicine. They are for bodies.” He wouldn’t say more. He didn’t need to.
The protest began peacefully yesterday, a march to the gates of the facility. By 10am this morning, someone threw a rock. By noon, the police opened fire with rubber bullets. I have counted three dead on my own screen — a young woman, a man in a blue shirt, and someone I cannot identify. The hospital at Kenyatta National is reportedly overwhelmed. A nurse I spoke with off the record said: “They are bringing in more every hour. Some have bullet wounds. Real bullets.”
The British advisory is telling citizens to avoid all travel to the area and to register with the High Commission. But for the hundreds of British nurses, doctors and lab technicians working on infectious disease programmes across Kenya, that is easier said than done. Many are embedded in rural clinics. Some have already told me they will not leave their patients.
This is a powder keg. The US embassy has gone quiet. The Kenyan interior minister is expected to make a statement in the next hour. But the money flow is what interests me. I have a source inside the US State Department budget office — they tell me that the Pentagon increased funding for USAMRU-K by 400 percent last year, under a line item called “Global Health Security.” No oversight. No public hearing.
I’ve been covering these labs for a decade. There are at least seven in Africa. They operate under a shroud of “cooperative biological research.” That is State Department speak for: we do what we want, and we don’t tell the locals. The locals are now telling us something else.
Gatwick-bound flights are filling up. I am staying. There are documents to be found, and bodies that should not be there. I will update as the tear gas clears.
