A nine-year-old girl has been defiled and killed in Chitago village, South Mugirango.
The body of the Standard Three girl was found dumped in a bush on Tuesday after she disappeared on Monday evening.
The girl did not return home after she was sent to collect milk from her aunt’s house a short distance away.
Isiah Nyangweso, the girl’s father, said she usually took less than 30 minutes to get back home whenever she was sent to collect milk.
According to the aunt, Drusilla Kemunto, the girl did not stay long on her errand.
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“She picked the milk and left almost immediately,” she said.
The body was recovered less than a kilometre from home after villagers found a handwritten anonymous note on the road describing where the body could be found and the names of suspects.
According to the note, the suspects had been paid Sh100,000 to kill either the girl or her father.
Police officers from Etago picked the body from the scene as residents demanded justice.
The angry villagers turned on one of the suspects and hacked him to death. A house belonging to another suspect was set ablaze as police and Kisii Woman Representative Janet Ongera called for calm.
County Police Commander Hassan Abdi said investigations had begun to establish the claims contained in the anonymous note.
“We do not encourage mob justice neither will we tolerate rape and defilement,” said Mr Abdi.
Ms Ongera appealed to residents to give the police time to investigate the killing.
“We should not take the law into our own hands,” she said, adding: “Any form of gender-based violation should be condemned in the strongest words possible.”
Suspect lynched
This is not the first such incident to rock the area.
In 2014, another girl was defiled and killed in the nearby Etago village.
No arrests have been made to date.
In Homa Bay, a man was killed as he tried to rescue his widowed sister-in-law from rapists on Tuesday night.
One of the suspected rapists was later lynched by villagers who rushed to the scene in Kawoch location.
Police said Lucas Otieno was stabbed to death by suspects who had attacked and raped his sister-in-law.
Mr Otieno had rushed to her home when she screamed for help. “They kicked my door in, gained entry and one of them attacked and raped me. I screamed and when my brother-in-law came, they stabbed him,” she said.
Villagers tracked down one of the suspects, who had been injured in the attack, and lynched him.
They complained that the gang had been terrorising the village for the last one month, mainly targeting widows.
