Police constable Mark Owino will be among the individuals lining up in an identification parade on Wednesday, even as he denies being near Ajigo market on the night that CCTV footage captured three men violently robbing a shopkeeper and his customers.
Shopkeeper Ezrah Gumbe will on Wednesday pick out one of the three robbers in an identification parade at Siaya Police Station.
Owino, the prime suspect in the February 2 robbery, was arrested after Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) officers reviewed CCTV footage from Gumbe’s shop.
The CCTV footage had earlier been shared on social media, with users taking screengrabs of one of the attackers.
Some social media users then claimed that the attacker in the screengrab was Owino, a police constable attached to Holo police station in the neighbouring Kisumu County.
While investigators believe that they got their man, Owino maintains that at 11.38pm on February 2, he had just got home after completing night shift duties at Holo police station.
The Siaya Chief Magistrate’s Court allowed police to hold Owino for 14 days pending completion of investigations.
The court noted that some of the victims were still recovering from injuries and had yet to formally record their statements.
The three customers were hospitalised after sustaining injuries from assault during the robbery, and will attend another identification parade at a later date.
Police believe that Owino was one of the three robbers, and are still on the hunt for two other men believed to be the arrested constable’s accomplices.
The robbers walked into Gumbe’s shop at 11.38pm on February 2, 2026, as the shopkeeper was attending to three customers at the tail end of his business day.
One of the robbers had a gun, investigators believe is an AK-47 assault rifle, while another held a machete.
Gumbe and his customers were ordered to lie down amid threats to their lives, as the robbers demanded access to the shop’s backroom.
“I lost approximately Sh140,000 to Sh150,000, judging by my daily sales. We had not fully closed the shop, so the money had not been counted. They also took my phone, my business phone used for M-Pesa, and one of my attendant’s phones,” Gumbe told the police.
Police constable Mark Owino.
Photo credit: Pool
The victims, some of whom have recorded their statements with the police, said they were forced to surrender their mobile phones and warned against raising an alarm.
From the footage, one of the attackers is seen slapping a person with a machete while issuing threats.
Gumbe, who has recorded a statement with the police, said the robbery occurred as he was making final preparations to close for the night.
He told the police that he did not know that one of the attackers was a police officer until the police arrested the suspect.
An officer familiar with the investigations told the Nation that the DCI was conducting a forensic audit of the officer’s mobile phone to establish his whereabouts on the day of the robbery.
