Deadly discovery: Man retrieving bodies from Kware dumpsite speaks

Local diver Kyalo Wambua retrieving bodies at Kware dumpsite in Embakasi Nairobi. The bodies moved to City mortuary. [Collins Oduor, Standard]

Every time Charles Wambua descended the gory quarry of death, he hoped that his would be a futile search.

He wished the last body he had just helped pull out would be the last. 

But whenever someone signalled the discovery of a gunny bag bearing characteristics that are now too familiar to Wambua, its contents were already known before he made that climb down.

Green in colour, they are wrapped up like parcels. That's how the retrievers distinguish them from the rest of the filth.

"That over there is a body. That other one, too," Wambua, draping the straps and line that he will use on his descent, tells a handful of helpers at the banks of the abandoned quarry in Kware, a squeezed slum within the larger Mukuru, in Nairobi's south-east.

One of the spotters will strike the bag with a rock, disturbing a swarm of flies, the unmistakable signal that therein lies a body. And Wambua, devoid of any protective gear, will find a place to hook his line and scale down the flat quarry walls.

Onlookers, already used to the pungency of the littered, black-watered pit, will guide the expedition from above. They hold their breaths.

Wambua retrieved two bags Sunday afternoon. Reports later suggested that a third was recovered. The Standard could not independently verify the reports as we had already left the scene.

From one of the bags came out a partially decomposed dismembered body of a young female.
"Is this a dog's leg?" a man in gloves poses as he hoists the woman's leg for other onlookers to see. "Is this a dog's head?" the drill goes.

Some are too shocked to respond. Mothers and fathers stare with hands over their mouths. Some look down, too shaken by the gory sight before them.

Others are angry, erupting in "Ruto must go" chants. The majority curse the police, under whose noses bodies were dumped undetected.

What follows is a cacophony of expletives directed at law enforcement authorities, accused of concealing the actual scale of the carnage.

The directorate of criminal investigations Sunday said eight bodies have been retrieved from the abandoned quarry.

Nairobi Governor Johnson Sakaja said in a statement that City Mortuary had processed eight bodies from Kware.

"Thirteen. I have retrieved 13 bodies so far," Wambua, wearing an empty gaze and an almost expressionless face, told me. His motivation for doing what he does?

"Those I am retrieving will bless me for heeding their cries."

Facing hostility, the police sat out Sunday's retrieval. But the masses went to them with the dead woman's body, dumping it at the neighboring Kware Police Station.

"They will tell us why they are killing our children," a woman yells. Mildred Atieno, the woman, later tells me that she made the trek from Dandora in solidarity with mothers of young women like her, who would never see their children again.

"Many probably don't even know their daughters are dead. I don't know what I would do if it had been my daughter in that bag," she said.

Their march to the station ended in chaos. Of course. Noticing the charging crowd, officers fired tear gas to disperse them. Gunfire rang out, too.

Their anger at the police is not unjustified. There are many routes into the abandoned quarry, now a dump site, but only one through which a vehicle could pass. The rest are footpaths with wooden bridges floating above the streams, blackened by effluent, that dot the area.

The route into the death site that can handle vehicles runs next to the police station. Locals suspect that the bodies were ferried there in lorries, and estimate that there are tens, if not hundreds, of bodies undiscovered in the dumpsite.

Some said they have previously discovered bodies at the site, insisting that the police are complicit.

"The only way lorries can dump here is if they bribe the police," claimed a local. "There is no way the police would miss any vehicle entering here."

The Standard could not immediately contact the authorities for a response. Officers from the station were yesterday transferred to allow "transparent" investigations, the head of the police service said.

It is not clear how long the decomposing bodies have been there, but it is easy to see why nothing seemed suspicious.

In plain sight, although the abandoned quarry is, the redolence of multiple odours makes no particular smell discernible. They all blend to let out a stench that is a signature of Nairobi's dumpsites.

All kinds of waste end up in the quarry's filthy bowels, which also serve as an outlet for the sewage from neighbouring slums.

If its smell is not enough repellant, then the depths of the former ballast quarry would work to keep people out.

But the abandoned quarry should never have been a dump site. It has because successive local and county governments have ceded their sanitation roles to a network of connected cartels.

This surrender has made Nairobi's open spaces qualify for dumpsites. Trenches, too. Across the city's informal settlements, roads are also dumpsites.

"Why don't they fence all these abandoned quarries," posed Eric Kirui, who resides in Lang'ata but was curious to see the quarry of death.

Since the news that visions led to the discovery of bodies came out, the dumpsite has attracted thousands from across the city, who make a spectacle of the recovery efforts.

They arrive in droves, some using Google Maps to access the location.

"These are our fellow Gen Zs dying," one of the 'tourists', a concerned young Kenyan, said. "This is not the Kenya we want."

Indeed, bodies recovered from the filthy pit are of young people. In the wake of the recent spate of police abductions of anti-government protesters, some have speculated that the kidnapping and deaths are related.

There is equal suspicion that an organ trafficking ring is involved. Others are worried that a serial killer is on the prowl.