Kenyan police have burned down the homes of some 4,000 people in a forest community during a long-running tussle between landless squatters and the government, officials and witnesses say. Police razed more than 300 grass-thatched huts in the Eburru forest near the town of Naivasha in the central Rift Valley, 90 kilometres north-west of the capital late on Thursday, leaving nothing but smouldering ruins in a latest bid to rid the area of squatters.

The authorities say the forest dwellers are an environmental danger.
"The police made sure that we did not go back by burning anything resembling a house," evictee Charles Mbuthia said, adding several people who had resisted orders to leave had been injured by police but the group would not move unless offered another place to live.
"We are ready to die here and we won't shift unless we are shown alternative land where we can settle," he said, complaining that he and his colleagues in the three makeshift villages targeted had been left penniless by the destruction.
Naivasha District Officer Kaunda Maikara told reporters at the scene that the authorities had been forced to act because the squatters were defying legal government orders to vacate the 12,000-acre forest considered a key water catchment basin for the region.
"We shall not stop the exercise until we get rid of all those residing in the forest as they have caused wanton destruction to a water catchment area," he said, maintaining police had given the squatters time to remove their personal items before destroying the homes.
Last month, a court ordered the government to halt such evictions after as many as 50,000 people were violently thrown out another forest further south, drawing howls of complaints from the human rights groups.
Mr Maikara did not say why authorities had opted the defy the order
Earlier this month, Kenyan Nobel Peace laureate Wangari Maathai implicitly called for the eviction of tens of thousands of squatters from the country's forests when she blamed the current drought disaster threatening millions with famine on illegal logging and destruction and degradation of trees.