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30 years later behind bars: Said Kiondo’s mistake was falling in love with another man’s wife

 Said Kiondo Photo: File

Said Kiondo had an affair with another man's wife. The man was Mwai Karani, a prominent Mombasa businessman, politician and GEMA bigwig, Mwai Karani. On the other hand, Said was a small fish; a mechanic. One with a scruffy beard, which made his peers to nickname him, Mandevu.

"I met Mary Njeri Karani, Mwai Karani's wife, when she brought her cars for repairs to my garage in Mombasa. In the process, we started getting closer," he says as he reclines in his seat. Dressed in blue slacks and a shirt, the clean shaven and heavy-set man cuts a regretful figure.

Himalayan blunder

Having an affair with Mary Njeri Karani was a mistake. And, when the unraveling begins, the consequences of such illicit affairs are usually bitter pills to swallow. But at the time, Kiondo – like many people who are caught in these whirlwind affairs – was too high on illicit love to read the writing on the wall.

That mistake snowballed into an irreversible Himalayan blunder when, one fateful night in December 1987, Mwai Karani was murdered in his Port Reitz home in Changamwe by four men who were lying in wait for him. The four men emerged from a house in the same compound that the deceased resided in, and hacked him to death.

Several people were arrested, among them Mwai Karani's sons, wife and four other men. However, it was Kiondo, Karani's wife and two other co-accused – Fredrick Katulo and Nahashon Adegu – who were charged with the murder of a man who Njuguna Gatonye, former journalist at KNA described as "a good guy to his friends, but to anybody who crossed his path, he was a ferocious fellow ... a man that you would not cross swords with."

Schools of thought

For Kiondo, detectives deduced that the motive was getting rid of competition, although the affair was, by and large, hush-hush. The other accused were placed at the scene of the murder by Karani's children.

Gatonye opines that there were two schools of thought. One was straightforward: Kiondo and his lover conspired to kill Mwai Karani because he was standing between their affair. The second hypothesis was that Kiondo could have been the fall guy in a bigger conspiracy, and was used to cover-up the reason for the murder, which could have either been political or related to the deceased's vast wealth.

Either way, Kiondo found himself smack in the middle of a plot that, whichever way it crumbled, would claim his freedom if not his life.

Executive ultimatum

The murder made national news, and turned the spotlight on Mombasa. Because of the deceased's public stature, cops gave this case top priority.

However, what made the usually slugging wheels of justice to spin faster and furiously was the executive ultimatum that the then President, Daniel Moi gave the law enforcement in Mombasa: "Bring the culprits to book, or else your backsides and badges are on the line."

After Kiondo was arrested, it would later emerge that these two lovers hatched a plot to have Mwai Karani killed. Kiondo was accused of hiring hitmen who snuffed the life out of the businessman and politician.

Connecting the dots

"I was framed ... I was nowhere near the scene of the murder and I had never met Mwai Karani in person. The children of the deceased knew me, and in court, they said that they did not identify me as one of the killers," Kiondo said in a previous interview.

Despite their denials, the prosecution was able to connect the dots and placed Njeri Karani, Fredrick Katulo, and Nahashon Adegu at the scene of the murder.

"On the day Mwai Karani was hacked to death, I only got to know about it on radio. That was days before the police came knocking on my door," Kiondo told Dennis.

"They came for me in the morning at my place of work, and they told me that I was needed at Nyali Police Station. At Nyali, I was asked if I knew about the death of Mwai Karani, but I replied that I did not know about it. They asked me if I knew his wife, and I replied in affirmative. They asked me how I knew his wife and the circumstances that led to it, and I told them that I was friends with her."

The two statements present a blatant contradiction. Kiondo had earlier said that he learnt of the killing through the radio, yet here he was saying that he knew absolutely nothing about it. Those might have been some of the inconsistencies that poked holes at his defense.

Allegedly, the murder was premeditated. The court heard that, a day before the brutal murder, Mwai Karani's wife and Kiondo met with another tall man at Mtopanga Bar in the presence of two other men. These two men became prosecution witnesses. Said Kiondo told the court that he went to the bar to buy chicken, while Mwai Karani's wife went to the same rendezvous to discuss business matters.

This meeting, whether it was circumstantial or not, raised red flags, considering the timing and what transpired immediately afterwards.

The last nail on Said's coffin was the discovery of one of his fingerprints. The fingerprints were traced in a bottle found in the sittng room on the lower unit of Mwai Karani's house. A machete found at the scene of crime was said to have belonged to the deceased.

Sentencing

After six months of trial, the four accused were sentenced to hang for killing Mwai Karani. Then Mombasa judge, E.M. Githinji disagreed with the majority jury which had returned the verdict of manslaughter. The judge ruled that the deceased's wife had masterminded the death of her husband and the said in part.

"She hatched a plot with Mandevu whom she had lived with for two and a half years to recruit other people to kill her husband. The deceased died a very painful death from cuts sustained."

"The bottles, pangas, a mattress, a pair of jeans and socks revealed that the attackers had been waiting for him in one of his rooms. From the evidence of the children, the thugs were not even afraid of the lights in the house."

Doing life

Time changes things. Kiondo is now clean-shaven and heavily-built. Mwai Karani's well-maintained house still stands on the same road where it was then. It has new occupants, though, and has been turned into a commercial office for a transport company.

As Kiondo languishes in prison, the woman who turned his life upside-down was released from prison, but under unclear circumstances. It is also not clear what she does or her whereabouts.

Mwai Karani's children have kept a low profile, and little is known of what happened to his wealth, or who manages the estate.

"I am serving this life sentence at the mercy of the President. One day I will be freed, and I am praying that President will remember me. The term I have served in jail is enough," Kiondo laments.

Kiondo could have committed the crime to be with the love of his life, or he could have just been a pawn in a very well-choreographed dance.

For now, Kiondo's mechanical engineering skills benefit the prison population. If he would have stuck to repairing cars and not wrecking another man's marriage, consequently getting himself implicated in his murder too, perhaps, he would now be the proprietor of a garage, or even several, bearing his name. Instead, in a strange twist of fates, the prison kitchen at Kamiti that serves more than 2,000 inmates has been named after him.

 

 

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