Over the last 40 days, the families of Stephen Kavingo Mbisi, Justus Musyimi Mutumwa, Martin Mwau and Karani Muema have made several trips to Nairobi Funeral Home, formerly City Mortuary, in a futile search for the quartet.
On each of those trips, attendants were insistent that nobody matching the name or description of the four missing men had been taken to the mortuary.
The responses by mortuary attendants, while frustrating on account of how long the four men had been missing, gave a sense of hope that Mbisi, Mutumwa, Mwau and Muema may still be alive.
It was false hope, as the bodies of two men out of the four were last Thursday, January 30 traced to the same place their relatives and friends had checked on numerous occasions – the Nairobi Funeral Home.
But as dead men tell no tales, neither Mwau nor Mutumwa cannot give an account of what happened, or whether their friends Mbisi and Muema are well, or even alive.
Mbisi and Mutumwa were abducted on December 17, 2024, and Mr Mwau and Muema, a day later. The four were friends.
Mutumwa’s family maintains that they visited several hospitals and mortuaries, including the Nairobi Funeral Home, and that they are heartbroken by the tragic outcome.
“We have run up and down in search of my brother. We have visited hospitals and mortuaries. We are heartbroken,” Mutumwa’s brother, Duncan Kyalo, said outside the Nairobi Funeral Home on Friday, January 31, accompanied by Public Service Cabinet Secretary Justin Muturi.
The Law Society of Kenya (LSK) and Police Reforms Working Group have now raised an issue over this: The families had reported their missing kin at a police station, and provided DNA samples, and yet bodies were found days after their disappearance, taken to the morgue by the police, and no match was done until on Thursday.
“We remain concerned by admissions under oath by the Inspector General of Police and the Director of Criminal Investigations on 30 January 2025 that they did not have any knowledge of where Justus Mtumwa and Martin Mwau were despite the fact that the two men’s bodies were delivered to the Nairobi Funeral Home by officers from Ruai Police Station. We call on those who continue to threaten and harass some of the former abductees to stop,” the joint statement said.
The two groups have now demanded the establishment of a missing persons database “to ensure efficiency, seamless interagency communication, and quick communication with victim families to resolve missing persons cases.”
But top of all, and following the frustrations of the abductions of over 89 Kenyans since June 2024, some of them have turned up dead, the two groups have demanded the formation of a commission of inquiry into the matter.
“We remind the authorities that the gravity of these issues had prompted 20,000 Kenyans to sign a petition calling for a commission of enquiry in July 2024. The time has come for this initiative to be put in place now,” LSK and the Police Reforms Working Group said.
It was a call backed by Mr Muturi, who told President Ruto that the buck stops with him and that he needed to take urgent action.
“The buck must stop somewhere. Mr President, you must order an end to abductions and extra-judicial killings. I am calling upon you to take decisive action to end these abductions and extrajudicial killings, as you promised. We must also investigate how and why this is happening. We cannot allow this to become the norm, young lives are being taken, and it must stop,” Mr Muturi said.
The disappearances of the Mlolongo group saw the High Court summon Inspector-General of Police Douglas Kanja and head of the Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) Mohammed Amin to explain the whereabouts of the individuals now known as the Mlolongo Four.
On Friday, January 31, civil society groups, influential individuals and politicians raised concern over the continuing trend of abductions, which have seen at least 82 people reported missing since June 2024, many of which followed the same script.
National Assembly Speaker Moses Wetang’ula called on the police to investigate the abductions, holding that the trend is tarnishing Kenya’s reputation.
“We shudder to get back to any situation where we were collecting bodies from River Yala and the other places. The Kenya Kwanza government promised to protect human rights and the police and DCI must investigate in full and in the earliest time possible to ensure that we bring this to an end. It is damaging the image of our country,” said Mr Wetang’ula.
Former Chief Justice David Maraga condemned the abductions and called for accountability and justice for the victims.
“These continued crimes are a stain to our collective conscience as a nation, and we are all duty bound to say #EnoughisEnough, #EndAbductionsNow! We cannot remain silent. These crimes are a profound betrayal of the future of our nation and the sanctity of the Constitution. A leadership that abets a culture of killings and human rights violations jeopardizes its legitimacy. We cannot be lulled into complacency in the face of such assaults to our shared humanity,” Mr Maraga said.
On her part, Narc Kenya leader Martha Karua said that many abductions had been conducted in similar fashion – hooded men with cars bearing concealed number plates, many times picking people forcefully in broad daylight and in the presence of CCTV cameras.
The script, she added, was the same in incidents where the State admitted that it had picked up foreign nationals and repatriated them back to their home countries.
Ms Karua cited the case of four Turkish nationals — Mustafa Genç, Hüseyin Yesilsu, Oztürk Uzun and Alparslan Tascı — who were picked up by security agents on October 18, 2024 in Nairobi.
She also cited a July 23, 2024 incident in which 36 Ugandan opposition members were arrested and deported.
Independent Policing Oversight Authority chairman Ahmed Issack Hassan said the commission had found a “worrying trend in its analysis of past cases as of November 2024.”
“The alleged abductions happened in broad daylight, with the abductors not bothered whether they were captured on CCTV nor the possibility of police intervention when the victims raised alarm. The victims reported torture, lengthy detention, and personal threats to injury. Further, victims reported that the persons who arrested them were not in police uniform, had covered their faces or camouflaged their cars,” Mr Hassan said, highlighting current challenges of witness intimidation, non-cooperation and “police officers clad in civilian attire, camouflaged and operating vehicles with obscure number plates during the Gen-Z demonstrations.”
"Let it be clear that IPOA has not exonerated the police from culpability in these cases,” he added.
On the evening of December 17, the four friends were seated at a public area in the small, but busy, Mlolongo town whiling away time.
Their jolly festive mood, and that of their families, was cut short when a group of four armed men jumped out of a black Subaru vehicle with concealed number plates. The armed men called for Mbisi and Mutumwa. A commotion ensued when the armed men tried to force Mbisi and Mutumwa into the Subaru.
But when guns were drawn, Mbisi and Mutumwa folded. The car sped off as soon as the duo and their captors boarded, and that was the last anyone would see or hear from Mbisi and Mutumwa.
Within minutes, their mobile phones had been switched off.
The following day, not so far from where Mbisi and Mutumwa were picked up, Mwau and Muema were abducted by another group of people believed to be security agents.
Mwau and Muema were snuffed out of a building. The quartet has since December been referred to as the missing Mlolongo Four.
Makueni Senator Dan Maanzo, who is also the lawyer representing the families of the four men, said that his clients were not aware of their kin’s whereabouts before Thursday, January 30.
Maanzo said that on Thursday, he received information that some of the men, whose disappearance triggered court summonses to the Inspector-General and the DCI boss had been found at the Nairobi Funeral Home.
Maanzo held that after receiving this information from mortuary staff, the families of two of the missing men were able to identify their relatives’ bodies.
He added that among the missing men identified by family members at the mortuary were Mbisi and Mutumwa.
The bodies of the two so far identified were taken to the mortuary by police officers, who booked them in as unknown males.
Records show that one of the bodies was found in a riverbank in Ruai and booked at the mortuary as a drowning victim, while the other was found in Dandora and booked as a murder victim.
The families of the four men have been searching far and wide, yet half of the quartet may have been lying at the city mortuary since December.
The Makueni senator said the information provided by the families had revealed that state security agents had a hand in the disappearance of the four men and their subsequent murder.
“We are normalising these killings. These people (the abductors) are operating with the full authority of those in power,” Maanzo said.
Human rights activist Hussein Khalid, who is among the individuals who have seen the bodies at the mortuary, said some of the victims had what appeared to be torture marks on their faces and hands.
“You can tell that they were tortured and even brutalised. One of them has a swollen face and the hands have marks that show they could have been handcuffed “Khalid said.
Post mortem examination is scheduled for Saturday, February 1 to ascertain the cause of death.
