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NAIROBI - A mob torched a Kenyan church overnight (NZT), killing villagers cowering inside, as the death toll from ethnic riots triggered by President Mwai Kibaki's disputed re-election soared to at least 180.
The opposition put the toll at about 250 deaths.
In the most grisly incident, as many as 30 people died when fire engulfed a church near Eldoret town where 200 members of Kibaki's Kikuyu tribe had taken refuge in fear of their lives.
A reporter and a senior security official said the fire at the Kenya Assemblies of God Pentecostal church had been deliberately started by a gang of youths.
The local reporter who visited the smouldering wreckage of the church in the fertile Rift Valley Province said he saw up to 15 bodies crammed in a corner.
"They were charred. I could not look at the scene twice," said the reporter from the scene, 8km from Eldoret.
He said about 200 Kikuyus were sheltering at the church after fleeing their homes.
"Some youths came to the church. They fought with the boys who were guarding it, but they were overpowered and the youths set fire to the church," he said.
Another source who spoke to witnesses said about 30 people had been killed.
The explosion of violence in one of Africa's most stable democracies and strongest economies has shocked the world and left Kenyans aghast as long-simmering tribal rivalries pitch communities against each other.
For Africans, the church deaths revive memories of Rwanda, where thousands were massacred seeking shelter during the 1994 genocide that killed 800,000 people.
Leading local newspaper, the Daily Nation, feared Kenya was on "the verge of a complete melt-down".
Police were out in force in the capital on New Year's Day, and the streets were quieter. But details emerged of a rising death toll and widespread destruction in one of the country's darkest moments since 1963 independence from Britain.
Washington first congratulated Kibaki -- then switched that line to express "concerns about irregularities". Britain, the European Union and others pointedly avoiding congratulating Kibaki, expressed concern, and called for reconciliation talks plus a probe into suspected voting irregularities from Thursday's ballot.
"The 2007 general elections have fallen short of key international and regional standards for democratic elections," the EU observer mission said in its formal assessment.
Western diplomats shuttled between officials of both sides, trying to start mediation. "The government thinks they can wait this out, but we're not convinced," one told Reuters.
The area around Eldoret is multi-ethnic but traditionally dominated by the Kalenjin tribe. It suffered ethnic violence in 1992 and 1997 when hundreds of people -- mainly Kikuyus -- were killed and thousands more displaced in land clashes.
A senior security official in Rift Valley said as many as 15,000 people were sheltering from the latest violence in churches and police stations in Eldoret.
He said the opposition was to blame for incitement.
"We have lived together for years, we've intermarried, we have children, but now they've asked them to turn against them," the security official said. "We don't do this in Kenya. It is what happens in Yugoslavia and Sudan."
Most deaths have come from police firing at protesters, witnesses say, prompting accusations from rights groups and the opposition that Kibaki had made Kenya a "police state".
Police gave a death toll of 143. But local media gave figures of between 153 and 164, and Reuters reporters around the nation estimated about 180 dead, with that number sure to rise.
Odinga said his Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) verified 160 fatalities to Monday night, but with overnight killings added, the total would likely be about 250 or "slightly more".
Forty bodies lay in the mortuary of Kisumu town, an opposition stronghold, the head of the institution said.
Many Kenyans said the violence was hitting the poor rather than the political class who caused it.
"It is the politicians living in their secure compounds who are inciting ethnic hatred," Father Daniel Moschetti told Reuters from Nairobi's Korogocho shanty-town as machete-wielding youths stalked outside his tin-roofed home.
"This is a war of the poor."
- REUTERS
