Up to 5,000 terrified villagers fled their homes in northeast Kenya on Tuesday after militiamen massacred 22 members of a rival clan, many of them women and children, in a pre-dawn raid, officials said.
The villagers began to flee shortly after details began to emerge of the ferocity of the attack in which some 40 raiders used firearms as well as garden implements to shoot, hack and slash their victims to death, they said.
At least three villagers were also wounded in the raid, they said.
The Kenyan Red Cross said more than 1,000 families of three to five members each had left their homes along the Kenyan-Somali border where the attack occurred on the village of Elgolisha near to the frontier town of Mandera.
They "have started fleeing the area because of fear that they might be the next targets," spokesman Anthony Mwangi said. "There is a very serious conflict in the region."
Tuesday's massacre is believed by police to be the deadliest single attack in the restive region where members of the Murule and Garre clans, both pastoralists of Somali origin, have fought often over water and pasture rights.
It was also unusual for its brutality, police said.
"They came with guns, machetes and clubs and killed mostly women and children," said a senior police officer in Kenya's Northeastern Province, which covers the territory in which the raid took place. "It was a very bad attack.
"In the morning the scene was strewn with dead bodies," the official told AFP.
Police blamed the attack on the Murule, noting that all the victims were Garre, some of whom had Kenyan nationality, and the Red Cross spokesman said those fleeing belonged to both clans.
"The aim of the Murule militiamen was to kill," Mwangi said. "There are fears of a revenge attack."
He said almost all of those who fled Elgolisha were moving toward the town of El Wak, some 10 kilometres away, were there is "relative security."
Kenyan police spokesman Jaspher Ombati said government security forces had killed eight of the attackers as they repelled the group and that a special paramilitary wing of the constabulary was in pursuit of the survivors.
Kenyan authorities also said they had boosted security in the region, where in January up to 30 people were killed, dozens more wounded and thousands displaced in a number of attacks launched by the Murule and Garre clans over claims to the region's scarce water and grass for their herds.
"This is part of a long-standing conflict between the two clans," said the police officer in Northeastern Province.
Elgolisha is only about two kilometres from the border where the factions have frequently launched tit-for-tat raids supported by their families in Somalia, itself ravaged by years of clan fighting.
In addition, bandits and freelance militiamen roam the Kenyan-Somali border, which has never been manned since 1991 when Somali strongman Mohammed Siad Barre was toppled, plunging the country into a lawless patchwork of fiefdoms governed by warlords.
Inter-clan clashes in the region are part of long-standings feud between Kenyan and Somali tribes that have frequently battled over access to resources as well as politics.
Efforts by Kenyan authorities to strike a lasting accord between the factions have been stymied by the absence of a functional administration in the failed Horn of Africa nation of about 10 million people.