A portrait photo of Sergeant Kipyegon Kenei at his home in Chamasisi Village, Rongai, Nakuru County on February 24. [Kipsang Joseph, Standard]
Detectives probing the killing of a security officer attached to the Office of the Deputy President, Sergeant Kipyegon Kenei, believe he was drugged before he was killed.
The officers have concluded that Kenei’s was murder that was later staged as suicide. His killers deleted all communication data from his mobile phone.
The investigators have established that data on the slain officer’s phone was intentionally flushed out, leaving little to rely on to trace the people he last spoke to before he was murdered.
A suicide note collected from his house on the day he was murdered did not bear his handwriting, police have concluded.
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“Everything was well-planned to appear like suicide. Sending money to his family, leaving behind a suicide note, making his bed and leaving the gun next to his body,” a detective privy to the ongoing investigations said yesterday.
The killers, believed to be three, were known to him. They placed his pistol on his chin and pulled the trigger before leaving unnoticed.
Marked man
Kenei was a marked man, as he had been scheduled to record a statement with the Directorate of Criminal Investigations on February 19 regarding the incident in which former Sports Cabinet Secretary Rashid Echesa and his team visited the second floor of Harambee House Annex and allegedly signed a fake Sh39 billion arms deal.
Breaks to probe
Kenei’s death has put breaks to the probe of the visit, which police were investigating because he was the man in charge of security at the ODP that day. Some officers have described his killing as treachery.
Five junior colleagues have so far recorded statements with the DCI and claimed they acted on instructions to clear the guests to the second floor of the ODP.
The team investigating the murder held their meeting yesterday to map the next stage of events. Another team went to his Nakuru home as part of the investigation.
Detectives believe his killers sought “technical assistance” to clear his phone of all its data. They have since recovered the deleted information.
Lying on the floor
The officer’s body was on February 18 found lying on the floor, near the door, with a visible gunshot wound on his chin.
The bullet exited through the upper part of his head. His bed, according to residents who accessed the scene way before officers from Embakasi police station arrived, was neatly spread.
Police said there was no evidence of a struggle in the room and no one heard the gunshot. The body was beginning to decompose and so might have taken approximately one or two days before it was found on February 20.
