Police taking too long to solve Yala killings' puzzle

A man points to a section where a body was recovered along River Yala, Siaya County. [Collins Oduor, Standard]

The Medical Superintendent of Yala sub-county hospital in Siaya County has said that seven unknown bodies are lying in the hospital's mortuary.

All the bodies were retrieved from River Yala in the last two months. Six of the bodies are male and one female.

Needless to say, the bodies have stretched the capacity of the hospital's morgue that can only accommodate 16 bodies.

Of greater concern, however, is the fact that River Yala is gaining notoriety for being a dumping ground of bodies of people who might have been killed elsewhere. Early this year, Kenyans were shocked following the discovery and retrieval of 32 bodies from the river in a short period.

Shockingly, most of the bodies - some which were stacked in sacks - bore torture marks; chopped fingers, ropes around their necks and even burn marks.

The inevitable conclusion, rightly or not, by members of the public was that these people were victims of police abductions and extrajudicial killings.

The discovery of new bodies points to the fact that those involved in the gory killings are not deterred by earlier discoveries of dead bodies. If anything, they look more emboldened. To date, there has been no updates on from the police service on investigations touching on the 32 bodies that were earlier retrieved from the river.

The circumstances that led to those killings have not been made clear, yet the longer it takes to conduct investigation the lower the chances of finding evidence to nail the culprits.

Citizens' expectations are that with an ultra-modern forensic laboratory procured at great cost to the taxpayer, cases of murder would take a shorter period of time to solve. It should worry us that the police appear to be at sea and completely unable to solve the puzzle of bodies that continue to be fished out of River Yala.

Police inability to get to the bottom of the murders leaves members of the public with no option but to conclude that they are not very serious in unravelling these murders. Police must do what we expect and pay them to do. There should be no excuses at all.