A mob has torched a church sheltering hundreds of Kenyans fleeing election violence, killing at least 50 people, many of them children, as the country’s disputed presidential election set off a bloody convulsion threatening what had been East Africa’s most stable and prosperous democracy.

Four days of rioting has killed at least 228 people, and 70,000 have been displaced in western Kenya by the post-electoral disruption, according to a Kenyan Red Cross report today.

The newly re-elected President Mwai Kibaki said today that political parties should meet immediately and publicly call as the for calm as the opposition leader Raila Odinga told Associated Press that the government is guilty of “genocide" after the deadly violence sparked by the disputed election result.

Fears are increasing that the bloodshed, which marks the worst crisis the country has known for decades, will spread into a larger ethnic conflict between Luo, who generally support Mr Odinga, and the Kikuyu tribe of Mr Kibaki.

The church fire in Eldoret, some 300 kilometers (185 miles) from the capital, killed at least 50 people, said a Red Cross volunteer who counted the bodies and helped the wounded.

A reporter and a senior security official said the fire at the Kenya Assemblies of God Pentecostal church, where 200 members of Mr Kibaki’s Kikuyu tribe had taken refuge in fear of their lives, had been deliberately started by a gang of youths, Reuters reports.

The local reporter who visited the smouldering wreckage of the church in the fertile Rift Valley Province told Reuters he saw up to 15 bodies crammed in a corner. “They were charred. I could not look at the scene twice,” he said from the scene, 8 km (5 miles) from Eldoret.

“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.

Aerial video footage of western Kenya taken by the Red Cross showed hundreds of houses on fire, farms set ablaze and road blocks every 10 kilometres (six miles). “This is a national disaster,” Abbas Gullet, the agency’s secretary general, told reporters.

Kenya's opposition leaders earlier today said they would forge ahead with a mass protest on Thursday despite a police ban.

The rally, was called by Mr Odinga, who lost the election to President Mwai Kibaki by only 230,000 votes. One million people are being urged to take to the streets in protest at the election in what is certain to become a violent showdown with security forces.

The European Union's election observation team said today that Kenya's elections fell short of key international standards and called for them to be independently audited.

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