NAIROBI, Kenya  Three Kenyan police officers were suspended and placed under investigation on Thursday after a newspaper published photographs that it said showed undercover officers murdering three men who had surrendered in the middle of a busy Nairobi highway.

Kenya’s leading newspaper, The Daily Nation, published photographs on Thursday that it said were taken by a driver at the scene on Nairobi’s Lang’ata Road where the episode unfolded about 9 a.m. Wednesday. In one photograph, a man described by the newspaper as an undercover officer points a gun at two men lying on the ground in the middle of the road. Another photograph shows the bodies of two men after they were shot dead.

Kenya’s minister for internal security, George Saitoti, confirmed that three people had been killed in the episode, and that three police officers were being investigated. Officials said the three victims were suspected of carjacking.

The shooting has set off a wave of condemnations and renewed calls for a sweeping reform of the Kenyan police. In 2009, a United Nations investigator accused the police of widespread extrajudicial killings and called for the removal of the country’s police commissioner at the time and its attorney general.