Human Rights Watch in its 51-page report said the security forces beat and tortured hundreds of civilians in several communities during an October 2008 disarmament operation in Kenya’s northeastern Mandera districts.

The international human rights body released the report on Monday at Nairobi's Sarova Stanley Hotel. It called on the Kenyan government to establish an independent inquiry without further delay to investigate and then prosecute those culpable for the tortures, rape and killings.

The report titled "Bring the Gun or You’ll Die: Torture, Rape, and Other Serious Human Rights Violations by Kenyan Security Forces in the Mandera Triangle,” documented rampant abuses during the operation and provided detailed accounts of the events in four of the 10 communities that were targeted. The evidence collected by Human Rights Watch across the 10 communities indicated that security forces tortured scores of men, wounded at least 1,200 people, including one man who died from his injuries, and raped at least a dozen women over the course of the three-day operation. It added that this is part of a broader pattern of similar abuses by security forces.

“Instead of protecting Mandera’s residents, the military and police systematically beat and tortured them,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. “Unless the behavior of the security forces changes, and perpetrators and especially commanders are held to account, all the government talk about police reform is meaningless.”

The report also called for the implementation of the Waki report, and called for the speedy implementation of reforms in the police force. It also called upon the US, Britain and the UN- and all other partners of the Kenyan government to pile pressure on the East African state to expedite the implementation of the Phillip Alston report. Prof. Alsto, the UN special rapporteur on human rights, had rubbed the government the wrong way when he called for the resignation of the Police Commissioner and the Attorney General.

But speaking to the BBC's 'Network Africa' on Monday, the Kenya Police Spokesman Eric Karaithe trashed the Human Rights Watch report, calling it baseless and petty. He added that human rights organizations have a habit of compiling funny reports that are based on half truths.

Last month, at the UN committee on Human Rights in Geneva, the Kenyan delegation admitted that what was contained in the Alston Report are 'partially true', and promised to implement the report. The admission by the government came as an anti-climax, owing to the government's open resistance and denial of the report's contents. Alston had implicated the government over the manner in which it dealt with militias in Central Kenya and the Mt. Elgon regions.