United in crime? Puzzle of ex-officers, ex-cons found dumped in River Yala

All the victims that the week-long Nation investigation identified were strangled and their bodies stashed in sacks before being thrown into the raging waters of the river. They came from as far from the scene as Nairobi and some had criminal pasts in the coastal town of Mombasa.

The fact that they were all strangled points to a meticulous but ruthless killing squad that has eliminated anyone who has dared stand in its way. Its victims range in profile from small-time business people to truant police officers and their friends. At the small mortuary in Yala, their bodies have been piling for weeks, some hard to identify without DNA tests. 

Only one of the victims was a woman. Her past, unlike that of the young men with whom she now shares a cold mortuary room, remains cloudy.

Philemon Cheruiyot Chepkwony and Peter Mutuku Kioo were last seen on December 3 leaving Nairobi for Nakuru. Edwin Kamande had offered to drive them in a white Toyota Hiace, registration number KAT 390M.

The three’s mission to Nakuru remained unknown, and little is also known on how they ended up as friends whose journey would be cut short, with one of them disappearing completely.

Chepkwony ran an electronics shop and a wines and spirits outlet at Pipeline in the city, while Kioo ran a matatu in Dandora, where he stayed after relocating from Mombasa. 

When their bodies were discovered at River Yala, both Chepkwony’s and Kioo’s hands had been tied at the back. Kamande has never been found, and it is feared his body was either washed away by the raging waters, or it was dumped elsewhere. The Toyota Hiace was later discovered in Gilgil, while their bodies were dumped more than 350 kilometres away.

Chepkwony “had been tortured and even identifying him was a challenge”, his brother, Meshack, said at Yala Hospital Mortuary.

Kioo was once a police constable based in Mombasa but was interdicted in 2015 after being arrested numerous times for armed robbery, while Chepkwony was also an officer with the General Service Unit in Nairobi.

Went missing

In August 22, 2018, officers from the Directorate of Criminal Investigations who were on the trail of a vehicle theft syndicate traced an Isuzu FV2 lorry belonging to Narok County that had been stolen two months earlier to a garage in Juja, Kiambu County. The lorry had even been given a fake registration number, KBK 374D, and it was about to be sold. 

The owners of the garage – Timothy Kamoye, John Kimani and David Jambaji – said they got the truck from Kioo. The three businessmen took the police to Kioo’s house at Drive Inn along the Nairobi-Thika highway, where they found him with Sh63,000 in fake currency.  

Kioo took the investigators to Chepkwony’s house at the GSU headquarters, where an unlicensed firearm, ammunition, 16 mobile phones, several SIM cards, fake number plates and identity cards were recovered.

“Police took time in getting the evidence and acted swiftly to recover the vehicle,” the then-Narok county commissioner George Natembeya said.

Investigators cast their net wider and arrested Peter Wainaina, a former police officer based in Mandera, who was said to be the ring leader of a dangerous syndicate that had been stealing vehicles across the country.

The six suspects were finally presented before a court in Narok on August 31, 2018, where they were denied bail for attempting to escape from lawful custody while at the Narok Police Station. They appealed at the High Court and were released in October 2019. Wainaina went missing shortly after their release and has never been found.

Chepkwony was buried on February 12, just a week after his body was identified at Yala Mortuary. Kioo’s family is still waiting for the results of a second DNA test after another family claimed the body, saying it belonged to one Erastus Ndirangu.

Ndirangu went missing on November 21 last year while travelling from Nairobi to Nakuru. He also had a number of run-ins with the police before his disappearance, although his sister, Irene Wahito, said he was a car dealer. 

This Nation investigation sought to find out who these men were, what they did when they were alive, and why anyone would want them dead. It was easier to establish their identities, but we soon realised that indentifying their executioners would be difficult. Were they, for instance, victims of a ruthless criminal underworld, or were they all killed by a police killer squad out to eliminate criminal offenders who have mastered the art of evading justice?

Take, for instance, the case of Eric Omeno. In the days leading up to his disappearance in August last year, his mother, Ms Margaret Akeyo, had an accident that left her in crutches.

When he received the news, Omeno hurriedly left Nairobi to visit her in Yala. While in the village, he got a call from one of his childhood friends, George Abongo, who lived at Polyview Estate in Kisumu but had coincidentally also visited his parents at Nyakwaro Mole village in Yala.

Read: Heavy toll after the discovery bodies in River Yala

Abongo reportedly told Omeno that he had an urgent business meeting in Kisumu and needed company. Since the two had not seen each other for months, Omeno agreed to join him. He also felt it was a good opportunity for them to catch up.

Before he left, his mother reminded him about his daughter’s school fees. Omeno asked his brother, Boniface Omondi, to follow him to the Corporative Bank branch in Yala town, where he withdrew some cash.

“He told me to pay his daughter’s school fees and take the rest to our mother,” Omondi recalled. It was the Saturday morning of August 7. 

Omondi took a boda boda, bade farewell to his brother and left him waiting for his friend, who was to pick him up. No one knows if the two friends ever met but a few hours later, both families were frantically looking for them.

“I called at 4pm but he was mteja (could not be reached). I called his wife but she was of little help,” said Abongo’s mother, Ms Jane Anyango.

“We thought he was busy somewhere and had switched off his phone. That was on the first day, then a week passed. We knew something wrong had happened,” offered Mr Omondi.

Both families did not know that their loved ones had disappeared together and that they were facing the same predicament as many others, whose loved ones – mostly men – were being killed by faceless individuals.

It was around this time that strange occurrences began happening at River Yala. Villagers going about their businesses started discovering bodies dumped at the river. Omeno’s family, which lives near the area, did not suspect anything at first.

They had been pursuing his disappearance with the Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) and were sure his phone was switched off in Kisumu on the day he vanished.

“In September, we heard that there was a woman who had disappeared and a diver had been hired to look for her in the river, but the body that was found belonged to a man,” said Omondi.

“The face resembled Omeno’s but the skin was white and the abdomen had been carved out, perhaps by the water. I was sure it was him.”

Extrajudicial killings

The police refused to release Omeno’s body to the family for burial, insisting that a DNA test had to be done. Meanwhile, Abongo’s family continued searching, hoping that he would come back home alive.

And in the months that followed, more bodies continued showing up at River Yala but authorities tried to hush the discoveries.

And then, on January 22, everything blew up. Activists who had heard about the discovery of bodies travelled to Siaya and addressed a press conference, accusing the government of extrajudicial killings. 

According to Haki Africa, 67 people had disappeared last year and eight since the beginning of the year. A good number of them had been retrieved from the river. A local diver, Mr Okero Okite, claimed he had retrieved 34 bodies.

The National Police Service disputed these numbers, saying only 19 bodies had been discovered, before revising it to 23. Police spokesman Bruno Shioso promised to issue a comprehensive statement on the state of investigations in two weeks.

It is now six weeks but no answers have been forthcoming from the police. The Nation camped in Yala in the course of this investigation, prodding, asking and investigating. In the end, Gem Sub-County DCIO told us that the matter had been taken up by the homicide department of the DCI headquarters in Nairobi.

Yala Sub-County hospital superintendent Bruno Okal was also non-committal, only saying that, as a hospital, we are not an investigative body”. 

“The answers you are looking for cannot be found here,” Okal told us. “Our job is just to preserve the bodies.” 

Away from the corridors of police stations and hospitals, the Nation learnt that at least 96 families had presented DNA samples to the authorities in the hope of identifying the remains of their loved ones.

Read: River Yala bodies - Families identify their kin

Seven bodies had been identified by last week. They are George Abongo, Eric Omeno, Margaret Atieno, Titus Lisutha, Philip Chepkuony, Peter Mutuku and Erastus Ndirangu. Their dealings and the manner in which they met their deaths, will for the first time provide clues on who wanted them dead, why and had the muscle to dump bodies at the river.

Omena’s sister-in-law Mary Akoth observed: “There is no criminal, however powerful, with the capacity to kill three people at a time and dump their bodies every three days at the same spot for months.”

Omondi, claiming the killers could be police officers, posed: “Why don’t you just arrest them and take them to jail if they committed a crime?” 

When asked what Omeno did for a living, one said he was an interior designer while the other said he was an architect. Abongo, they added was a contractor who drilled boreholes.

While we were unable to get any other contradictory profile of Omeno, apart from the fact he once vied for an MCA’s position and lost in the primaries, Abongo was well-known within Kisumu’s social circles. He was flamboyant, splashed money on expensive drinks in night clubs and drove a black Toyota Crown.

He was always in the company of suspected fraudsters at a bar in Lolwe Estate and had had several run-ins with the law. Those we talked to about how, if he was a known criminal, he had never been arrested and prosecuted said he had “powerful friends” at the Kisumu Central Police Station.

“Who doesn’t know Abongo? He had a lot of money and no one can really say what he did for a living. The police knew he was part of a gang that stole vehicles,” said a person who knew him.

The Nation could neither confirm nor refute this claim, and none of the family members indicated they knew he was a criminal.

But if Abongo was a contractor as his family, claims who wanted him dead? Was Omeno collateral damage or were the two involved in some dangerous businesses?

We may never know the answers to these questions but the lifestyles of five of the other people whose bodies were dumped at the river may offer some clues; and perhaps point to who might have wanted them dead.

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