Michael O’Farrell
Political Reporter in Kenya
IT’S Monday July 5 in Nairobi as twenty five-year old Steve Mwangi flicks on the midnight TV news. What he is about to see will change his life forever. Immediately, Steve recognises the registration number – KEN 428F – of a car flashed up on his TV screen.
And there, lying motionless on the dusty red ground, surrounded by an AK47, a hand gun and a pile of banknotes is his father, fifty two-year-old Benard Mwangi Wachira.
“I saw my father’s car. I saw him lying on the ground. I could not even move,” he remembers. Brief reports in the national newspapers the next day describe an armed and dangerous criminal gunned down by brave detectives.
Such shootings are common place in Kenya and rarely ever questioned. If any doubts are raised, the police investigate themselves, inevitably avoiding any sanction.
But Benard was no gun wielding criminal. A wealthy business man with extensive property interests, he supported two wives and ten children as well as an extended family.
At the scene of the shooting in the bustling Nairobi suburb of Ongata Rongai, Benard’s congealed blood has left a dark stain on the dusty road.
Some are afraid to speak. But many more come forward. They tell of a disturbing murder carried out with impunity by a crack police team known as the Flying Squad.
Far from engaging in an armed heist, as the police suggested, witnesses describe Benard having a friendly chat with security men outside a local Shell petrol station.
Then, pulling up in an unmarked white Landrover, Flying Squad members arrested Benard as a crowd gathered around to watch.
After searching him and his vehicle, without finding anything, the officers pushed him into their jeep and brought him 500 meters down the road.
It appears the aim was to connect him to an abandoned getaway car from a nearby robbery a kilometer away.
Unable to start Benard’s car they pushed it to the same spot all the while followed by curious onlookers.
Then, witnesses describe Benard stepping out of the police jeep and falling to the ground as three shots rang out, two of them hitting him in the head at almost point blank range.
“I saw a hole in his forehead and on the side of his head, the officer who shot him was beside him trembling,” one witness who has agreed to testify in court for Benard’s family told the Irish Examiner.
“They took an AK47 and a hand pistol out of their jeep and put it beside his body. They put money there too and they took a lot of pictures.”
“It was not a justified shooting. They saw he was just alone and they shot him. He was just an ordinary man.”
Benard’s sister Rose Wanjiru, 56, listens with tears welling in her eyes. She remembers a jolly and kind man who enjoyed following boxing.
“He had young children. Who is going to assist them now? There is no one to support them now. Even if someone is a criminal they have a right to be charged and the right to a trial, not to be shot in the head.”
Benard Mwangi Wachira was buried last Saturday. Although the odds are stacked against them, his family’s search for justice is only just beginning.
ALTHOUGH OFFICIAL FIGURES are not available, unjustified police killings and incidents of police brutality and torture are common place throughout Kenya. Such suffering is not limited to Nairobi.
More than 300 miles away in the mid-size rural town of Kitale renowned human rights defender and Irish missionary Gabriel Dolan runs the Catholic Justice and Peace Commission.
“They have shifted from just torturing people to killing people at will. The police know if they torture the story will get out so they now say we won’t torture them, we’ll kill them instead.”
Successful prosecutions of police officers are so rare few can remember the last time a policeman went to jail although there have been a handful of cases in recent years.
Kenya’s Independent Medico Legal Unit (IMLU) which seeks to use medical evidence to prosecute police involved in torture or killings, has carried out 218 autopsies since 1998.
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Maina Kiai, the chairman of Kenya’s National Commission on Human Rights, admits there is little he can do despite the fact that the vast majority of those who approach the statutory body have been abused and tortured by police.
“We are just a gesture and without the will of the Government to stop it this will continue,” he says with a shrug adding that he believes 50% of the entire Kenyan police force to be corrupt.
And the will of the Government is clear. Internal Security Minister John Michuki has issued a ministerial decree to police to “shoot to kill” any suspected armed criminal.
Just before the summer Minister Michuki said killing someone over a mobile phone theft was justifiable.
In prisons too, conditions are atrocious, with murder and torture common place.
Despite a Government commitment to stamp out such abuses and allow journalists free access to all, the Irish Examiner was refused access to Nairobi’s notorious men’s prisons and instead given a sanitised tour of the city’s Langata women’s prison – a place which although grim by western standards is far improved on the mens’ facilities.
The implications of such a political failure to embrace reform, combined with an unaccountable and corrupt police force are felt daily by many.
Just ask the family of 19-year-old Charles Odhiambo whose battered body still lies in the chilling cabinets of Nairobi’s central mortuary.
Arrested over a petty dispute involving chewing leaves on June 19 Charles was brought to Nairobi’s Makongini police station at 3pm.
The complaint against him was quickly dropped, but police kept him locked up and refused to allow his sister Beatrice Atieno, 29 to see him.
“At midnight they knocked on my door and asked me to come out. They asked was my brother usually like this. He was there in the back of the police jeep struggling to breath, blood seeping from his mouth, ears and nose. He was staring straight ahead, not blinking and not moving at all. I thought he was dead.”
Charles died six hours later from his wounds in hospital. His body still lies in Nairobi’s city morgue today as community activists try to help Beatrice raise enough money to bury her brother.
A local campaign is also seeking justice for Charles and his posters adorn lamp posts throughout his downtrodden community.
But already the posters are fading and like Kenya’s many other police victims Charles Odhiambo will most likely be forgotten as his killers go unpunished.
Forgotten, like 19-year-old student Dennis Kimani, another victim shot in the head by police just two weeks beforehand.
Standing above the family’s ancestral grave in rolling hills 50km from Nairobi Jane Wanja Kimani, 49, survey’s the sweeping valley below and begs for justice at the spot where just days ago she laid her son to rest.
Police say Dennis was shot on June 4 because he was in possession of a toy gun which he refused to put down. If the story is true, they have never produced the toy gun as evidence.
“If they thought he was guilty they should have arrested him and given him due process. But they just shot him and then started talking about toy guns without showing any evidence at all. The police officer should be held accountable. They have a complete lack of respect for human life. They will pay for this mistake.”
Amid the scent of wild mint and a sweet African herb called Mubangi surrounding the grave, Jane remembers her son.
“He was a very good young man. He loved taking care of his mother and he always did the dishes. You know he wanted to be a pilot.”
“I HAVE SHOT many, not one – most of them were criminals.” Nairobi’s top police chief Julius K Ndegwah is the embodiment of his interior minister’s orders to shoot to kill. He does not respond when asked who the other people he shot were.
“When I shoot them I feel just fine. I feel great. I feel like a conqueror because I have killed a criminal. Most of those I have shot were armed and if they had got the chance they would have killed me. I’m always proud of that shooting because with that kind of shooting I feel I have conquered somebody.”
Responsible for four of Nairobi’s busiest police stations, Ndegwah admits that up to 10% of his force is corrupt but is adamant that police beatings and killings are a thing of the past.
“I have not had a single case of a person being assaulted by a police officer. We really observe the human rights.”
He does not mention the fact that since statutorily guaranteed access to police cells has been denied, the Human Rights Commission is suing him to try and gain access.
Ndegwah is also completely confident of his officer’s ability to investigate themselves impartially.
He refuses to comment on any of the cases highlighted in this article saying they occurred in other districts. But he confirms that policeman involved in questionable shootings are issued with a new firearm and immediately returned to the streets.
An hour later and across town in Jogoo police station an epileptic man is lying in the courtyard, his mouth foaming, and body writhing uncontrollably.
Ignoring the man’s agony just feet from his desk, second in command – Jack Njagi Peter cites the proliferation of arms in Kenya as justification for the high number of police shootings.
“We deal with armed people on a daily basis. We have a problem with the proliferation of small arms here. I don’t see how you can tell me to act more responsibly. It’s a matter of if you can get the other person first. We have lost so many police officers and we don’t hear anything about that from the human rights people.”
THE HUMAN RIGHTS people have their own frustrations.
“They can be as brutal as pushing a bottle of water into a woman’s genitals. We have seen a few cases, especially in women, where they have been raped,” says Doctor Andrew Gachie – a pathologist with the IMLU.
Crucially though he believes police are now shooting to kill because they know torture injuries can be detected.
“Torture can be evidenced. This is why we get so many victims of shooting. I did 13 post mortems in June alone.”
There are so many cases of direct torture and shootings that often those felled in the cross fire get completely overlooked. These include victims like 18-year old Beth Wanjiku who was crippled by a police bullet in the Nairobi slum of Baba Dogo in 2003.
Following the shooting those involved left her lying in the mud to die. She survived. But to this day, although she is now disabled, she will scream in panic and attempt to escape, trying to crawl desperately if she hears a gun shot close by.
“I’m taking it very badly. I cannot be the way I would like to have been. I want justice to be done and the person who did this to be prosecuted,” she says.
That sentiment is shared by most of those waiting to tell their stories to the Catholic Justice and Peace Commission in Kitale.
It’s a normal Tuesday afternoon and as victim after victim comes to seek help, the organisation’s coordinator Samuel Lemale doesn’t hide his frustration.
“Once you are taken to a police cell you will come from there deformed,” he says amid taking statements.
Deformed like nursing officer Peter Musto Ndiywa, 30, from the remote district of West Pokot – a turbulent 9,000 square kilometer region bordering Uganda with 360,000 people and not one lawyer.
Attacked by a particularly feared paramilitary branch of the police known as Administration Police on May 13, Peter ended up with a head wound and a badly fractured leg.
His crime – he refused to pay a small bribe to avoid unwarranted arrest.
“I’m against that it’s not acceptable we are trying to fight corruption here. I want justice to happen. I was not even taken to court. They were brutal with me. They were so brutal. I want them to go to jail.”
But a glance at the case of photojournalist Wallace Gichere gives a painful indication of how justice is rare currency for Kenya’s police victims.
On Friday October 4th, 1991 police officers burst into the Nairobi home of Wallace, woke him up and threw him out the fourth story window of his bedroom.
“Within the flash of a second I was lifted and the next thing I knew they threw me through the window of my bedroom. To me it felt like a bad dream when I was in the air rolling.”
Wallace was left for dead with three officers guarding his body until a transport came to bring his body to the morgue three hours later. After finally managing to groan he was brought to hospital and woke up the next day paralysed and chained to his bed.
“I am about six feet tall but I have been reduced to just over three feet by the Kenyan police.”
Nine years later in 2000 a Government standing committee on human rights recommended compensation and the prosecution of the officers involved.
Wallace finally received some compensation only after two well publicised hunger strikes.
But 14 years later no one has been prosecuted although some of those involved have sought forgiveness.
“Some of them have called me and I tell them vengeance is not mine, it’s God’s.”
And his message for the outside world?
“Kenya is not about elephants and lions, that’s rubbish. Look about at the other things, the police and the problems. Really we have a long way to go.”
THIS PROJECT WAS FUNDED BY THE DEVELOPMENT EDUCATION UNIT OF DEVELOPMENT COOPERATION IRELAND.
THIS STORY WAS FIRST PUBLISHED IN THE IRISH EXAMINER NEWSPAPER.
