Rogue police: Looking back at era when forced disappearances, killings were rife

With time I learned that most of the dead were victims of police brutality. Many were men considered to be a threat to the ruling party Kanu and the government of Mzee Jomo Kenyatta. Others were courageous men and women who had demanded to be given back land stolen from them by powerful politicians in charge of land buying companies.

Our forests and shambas had been turned into killing fields. From prominent politicians to the humblest of citizens, who were murdered by state apparatus and their bodies thrown into the wild.

Mungai the Horrible

In my youthful days, Nakuru was run by a rogue police force under an officer who claimed to have close ties with President Jomo Kenyatta. He had his own police mafia squad that terrorised everyone and instilled the fear in ordinary mortals.

Here was a mere police officer who could stop the motorcade of a top government official and make him sit on the hot tarmac. He allegedly could whip senior politicians in public and get off scot-free. He was a law unto himself and Rift Valley's single most dreaded symbol of terror.

Elder politician Mama Phoebe Asiyo once shared with me tales of her terrifying encounter with the officer.

"On one occasion my family and I were going home to the village. We were in our new car. We reached a spot in Naivasha where we found many cars had stopped. There was absolutely no movement. We waited for many hours. Then, the dread officer arrived. He was on horse back. I tensed as he approached our car. He ordered us out of the vehicle which he commandeered and drove off. We slept out in the cold. The following day we took public transport to the village. Our vehicle was recovered a few weeks later," said Asiyo

She recalled that he was rough and abusive. He referred to the Asiyos as nugu (monkeys), Mera ici. He menacingly pointed his gun at them and used the most dehumanising language.

"We could only watch in fear and pray to God that it didn't turn out worse. We were completely helpless before this man that had become a monster," she said.

Police Impunity

I shudder when I think of how many unknown atrocities were committed under the officer's watch.

The stench of the rotting corpses and the officer's impudence came back to me recently when President William Ruto ordered the disbandment of the Special Services Unit (SSU), that operated under the Directorate of Criminal Investigation (DCI). The president said that the unit was conducting extrajudicial killings and dumping bodies in River Yala in western Kenya.

The police operate with impunity whenever they enjoy political patronage or when a country's governance system is rotten to the core. In Jomo Kenyatta's time, men and women would disappear from their homes and offices never to be seen again. A few, like former Nyandarua legislator J.M Kariuki were picked up by senior police officers in public glare, murdered and their bodies dumped in the forest.

It is during the era of Mwai Kibaki and Uhuru Kenyatta that bodies started to emerge in rivers. From the Athi River, to the Chania River, corpses would pop up. Some men arrested in Nairobi or central Kenya would be fished out dead in River Yala.

George Kinoti's Story

Unlike the Nakuru officer, a crude, primitive bully, former head of Directorate of Criminal Investigations George Kinoti was brilliant, educated and approachable. Kinoti is described by many as; friendly, and reform minded. He transformed police investigations, embraced technology in fighting crime and in crime prevention, and incorporated forensic science in solving criminal cases. Many citizens viewed him as a hero who tamed crime.

In his forthcoming memoir, Battle of lifetime, former Nation Media Group Crime Editor Stephen Muiruri describes his traumatising experiences in unearthing police killings.

"I made friends with morgue attendants and they often tipped me off when the police dumped a body of a person whom they or gangsters had felled by bullets. I visited the most bizarre crime scenes in Kenya. I saw corpses soaked in blood, hacked by machetes, strangled, and slain by bullets fired by police or gangsters."

To cover up state crime, the police needed a Chief Government Pathologist they could work with. Former government pathologist Jason Ndaka Kaviti told a puzzled commission inquiring into the Robert Ouko murder that the minister broke his own legs and hands before shooting himself in the head then setting himself ablaze.

The Mbaraka Murder Mystery

Muiruri unearthed the truth behind the killing of a Kiambu man by the police during the era of CID Director Noah arap Too. Too had been ordered by the court to produce the remains of Stephen Mbaraka Karanja. Officers took the court on a grave digging spree, exhuming 19 bodies in Eldoret, yet the man had been executed in Karura forest.

"The CID killer squad was under the command of Patrick Shaw, the legendary police reservist and arguably Kenya's most feared policeman. I established that a Sergeant Chege shot Mbaraka dead in the heart of Karura Forest. At gun point, officers forced one of Mbaraka's terrified accomplices to douse his body with petrol and strike a matchstick," says Muiruri

Mbaraka, who had a criminal record in his Nyambari Village in Uplands, Kiambu County, left his home one morning to meet his lawyer in Nairobi. The CID pounced on him before he could reach his lawyer's office. Eight days later, he "vanished" from police cells. His wife went to court on May 20,1987 and requested Justice Derek Schofield to order the release her husband.

On June 5,1987, State counsel Njenga Muchiru disclosed that Mbaraka had been shot dead in an Eldoret forest when he allegedly tried to escape from the police. The judge ordered the police to exhume the body and hand it over to Mbaraka's family for decent burial. On June 25, 1987, grave diggers excavated 19 graves, seven of them twice, all in vain.

The Mbaraka murder saga became a bruising legal tussle that led to the resignation of Justice Schofield. The judge said he resigned because of an aggressive attempt by powerful forces to meddle in the case

Special Police Squads

Whenever crime took a life of its own, the police formed special units to tame it. The units were always established with good intentions before they turned into terror gangs. The Kanga Squad was such an amorphous unit. It hunted down dangerous criminals such as; carjackers, bank robbers, drug barons and organised gangs of the underworld. Kanga had been formed to rival existing elite units like the Flying Squad, Special Crime Prevention Unit (SCPU), November Squad, Anti-Narcotics Unit (ANU), Anti-Terrorism Police Unit (APTU), Kwekwe, Rhino, Spider and Eagle.

The Kanga Squad was heavily equipped with top range vehicles. It is the Kanga Squad that was used to raid the Standard Group in 2006.

Kinoti's Nine Lives

Kinoti is a man with a dramatic life story. For months, he lay in coma on a life-support machine at Nairobi's Forces' Memorial Hospital. He was then the Superintendent of Police and also head of the Kanga Squad. He was also personal assistant to CID director Joseph Kamau. Kinoti had been shot 28 times.

Having hunted down dangerous criminals for years, Kinoti believed he was battle hardened until that fateful night. He was driving along Jogoo Road, when he came upon a scene of crime. Two gangsters were wrestling with a female motorist. With a gun in hand, Kinoti stepped out of his car and confronted them. He did not know there were three others following in a different car.

He cocked his gun and fired at the two. The other three gangsters opened fire from AK47 rifles. When the gunfire died, bullets had ripped through Kinoti's body. He lay in a pool of blood in the middle of the road. Kinoti defied science and recovered after months of hospitalisation.

The Kanga squad was formed in 2004, in response to runway crime with serial killers terrorising wananchi in Ngong and Nairobi. The killers conducted a string of attacks and murders paralysing life and business for 18 months. They had killed many wealthy home owners in Ngong town.Some were slaughtered as their wives and children watched in horror.

The insecurity sweeping through Kenya - led to the sacking of police commissioner Edwin Nyaseda and CID director Daniel Ndung'u.

Kinoti and six CID officers camped in Ngong, Ongata Rongai, Kiserian and Upper Matasia for weeks hunting down the killers. For months they lived like homeless men sleeping in filthy culverts on the roadsides. They concealed a deadly arsenal of machine guns and AK-47 rifles in dirty sacks.

Muiruri says in his book that; "Their weeks of waiting came to an end when they received information that the terror gang had been sighted going to raid one of the homes. Four robbers, and the two-serial killer, were felled by the snipers' bullets."

On January 5, 2018, President Uhuru Kenyatta, appointed Kinoti as head of DCI.

During the reign of Commissioner of Police, Maj Gen Ali, the CID formed Kwekwe Squad that was responsible for wanton killing of youth suspected of being members of the Mungiki sect. Many Kenyans with nothing to do with Mungiki were eliminated.

The Flying Squad was the original terror unit. Its victims were gunned down. However, with advanced forensic and ballistic analysis, guns can be traced back to the owners. The killer squads changed techniques.

Victims would be placed in a container within police station before transportation to their death place. They would be strangled using electric wires and their fingers chopped off to ensure that when the bodies are recovered, identification would be impossible without finger prints and without identification documents. Kinoti disbanded the Flying Squad and formed SSU. His intentions were noble - fighting organised crime. He also enhanced the Anti-Terrorism Police Unit (ATPU).

Gradually however, the SSU and ATPU became weapons of terror against real and imagined enemies of the State. The SSU is said to have been used to terrorize politicians in the run-up to the 2022 general elections.

The SSU unit is responsible for bodies dumped in rivers in the Mount Kenya region. The bodies would be stuffed in sacks with heavy stones then dumped in the rivers. During one of the recovery operations in Mount Kenya, a different police unit went to investigate the killings. The policemen who had carried out the murders were amateurish. They had carried their phones to the scene of dumping betraying their mission.

Since then, the dispatch shifted to Baringo, in bushes and roadside and River Yala. The killer squad invented another method to discard bodies without trace. The few recovered bodies had their fingers chopped off. There have been claims ATPU was used to arrest and kill terror suspects.

Was Kinoti an astute crime buster or did he allow himself to be used by politicians? Most of his supporters argue that he tremendously transformed war on crime and made Kenya a safer place to be. Unlike his predecessors that avoided the media like plague, Kinoti loved the limelight. He spoke on almost every case and topic, from murder to corruption to electoral fraud. And it's that love for the media, that his detractors say was his biggest undoing. He betrayed his dalliance in politics.