The arrest of a second youth in a high-profile case in which a 16-year-old girl was gang raped and dumped in a pit latrine, breaking her spine, shows Kenya is starting to tackle its "epidemic" of sexual violence, campaigners said.
Hundreds of activists marched on Kenya's police headquarters in protest last year after officers held three suspects in the case but released them after making them cut the grass at a police compound.
Some 1.7 million people signed an international online petition calling for justice for the girl, referred to as "Liz" to protect her identity.
When the trial opened in June, only one of the six men suspected of raping Liz, as she walked home from her grandfather's funeral a year ago, had been charged.
The director of public prosecutions (DPP) said on Twitter on Sept. 25 that a second suspect had been arrested.
"He was found to be below 18 years old," it said. "The court ordered that he be remanded at Kakamega juvenile remand prison." Kakamega is 360 km (200 miles) west of the capital, Nairobi.
Rape is rarely reported in the east African nation because of the stigma and a lack of faith in the justice system, though there are strong laws against sexual assault.
The outrage attracted by Liz's case has spurred the government to action, campaigners said.
"There is finally some engagement on tackling this epidemic," Brendan Wynne, spokesman for the women's rights advocacy group Equality Now, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Equality Now said it had sent the DPP's office in June a list of rape cases in Busia County, where Liz was raped, and said the office was now investigating 70 cases there in which there had been inadequate investigations or no arrests.
"The CID (Criminal Investigation Department) appointed a team of specially trained investigators and deployed to Busia to investigate," Equality Now lawyer Kimberley Brown told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
"Several arrests have been made following their arrival," he added.
The trial of the suspect in Liz's case resumes in November, the DPP said.
