Four police officers to face charges in DCI squad probe
Focus now shifts to former DCI chief George Kinoti and Special Service Unit (SSU) director Pius Gitari as four police officers appear in court today to answer to charges of kidnapping two Indian IT experts ahead of the August general election.
The four SSU officers, who were arrested on Friday evening, will face an additional charge of conspiracy to commit crime.
Other top bosses from the Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) are also likely to be targeted in the ongoing crackdown against officers attached to the unit whose members have been linked to extra-judicial killings and forced disappearances.
Preliminary investigations have revealed that a senior officer attached to the Crime Research and Intelligence Bureau (CRIB) tracked and monitored the movement of the two foreigners at the heart of the ongoing investigations.
Bones, clothes and belts believed to belong to the two executed IT experts and their driver were on Thursday evening found in the Aberdare Forest and are being analysed.
A team of about 100 officers were dispatched to the forest after one of the SSU detectives indicated in his statement that the bodies could have been dumped there after they were abducted and killed.
Investigations further revealed that the SSU squad blamed for the operation team was under the command of a Chief Inspector with a Sergeant as the driver and two other members, both corporals. The People Daily has withheld the names of the officers to await their arraigning in court, probably today.
Detectives from the Internal Affairs Unit (IAU) have linked the four, together with other officers who are yet to be arrested, to the abduction and possible murder of the two Indian specialists who flew into the country in April to assist a political party with election preparedness.
Some of the officers have been forensically placed at the scene of the crime where Zulfiqar Khan and Mohammed Zaid and their taxi driver, Nicodemus Mwania, were abducted as well as where their remains were found on Thursday.
One white and one black Subaru Forester from the unit, registration numbers KBZ and KCG respectively are also believed to have been used in the operation and have been detained at the Capitol Hill police station, Nairobi, where the People Daily team found them parked at the weekend. The foreigners had left a club in Westlands at around midnight on July 23 before they were abducted about 15 minutes later, according to CCTV footage from the Nairobi Expressway, the Integrated Command, Control and Communication (IC3) Centre at Jogoo House and other buildings in the city.
One of the cameras captured the vehicles blocking the occupants of a grey Toyota Fielder while pointing guns at them. The abduction took place just two days before they were to leave the country for India.
On Thursday last week, President William Ruto directed that investigations into the case be speeded up and those found culpable brought to book. “We can efficiently and effectively suppress crime, monitor, disrupt and apprehend criminals without abducting, torturing, killing or causing citizens to disappear,” he said during his Mashujaa Day speech in Nairobi last Thursday.
Exemplary service
Acting Inspector-General Noor Gabow has also warned that the police service will not tolerate lawlessness, and that lives must be protected and only taken away under extreme circumstances and in accordance with the law.
“Whereas a majority of our officers are law-abiding and offer exemplary service, a few officers operate outside the constitutional and legal framework, hence tarnishing our good image,” he said.
Though the SSU has been commended for some delicate security operations in the past, preliminary investigations have also linked it to a series of abductions and killings.
On Friday, 21 officers from the unit — including two officers of the rank of Chief Inspector, an Inspector, three Sergeants, 10 Corporals and five Constables — were grilled for the second time over the Indians case, leading to the arrest of four of them. Following the disbandment of the unit earlier this month, all the officers have been directed to surrender their weapons and vehicles and proceed on 30 days compulsory leave.
Parallel investigations into the ongoing case have revealed shocking details of how senior police officers interfered with the preliminary investigations and frustrated inter-agency cooperation that the government has been pushing in the quest to resolve the murder case.
As a result, last week, senior DCI officers were reshuffled with the director of the Investigations Bureau (IB) John Gachomo being transferred to the IAU to replace Mohammed Amin. Amin had earlier been appointed as the new DCI boss.
Two days later, however, Gachomo’s transfer was cancelled and he was directed to report to police headquarters to await deployment. He was immediately replaced by IAU’s deputy director, Esther Ngang’a, a Commissioner of Police.
At the weekend, a senior government official told People Daily that the blame game between senior detectives was a clear indication of what has been ailing the DCI’s top leadership.
For instance, Gachomo was the first officer to disown an affidavit on the murder of Tob Cohen, whose case is still ongoing. He said he only signed a one-page letter on the instruction of his former boss, Kinoti.
With the fallout in the directorate continues to claim more scalps, a major restructuring is expected at the DCI headquarters in the near future to weed out officers believed to have targeted some individuals and politicians unfairly.
For instance, in what could be a serious indictment to Kinoti, the current Head of Serious Crimes Unit (SCU), Obadiah Kuria, has requested the Director of Public Prosecutions to withdraw a Sh7.3 billion corruption case against Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua.
When news of the ongoings at the DCI became public, former Law Society of Kenya President Nelson Havi demanded that all the officers publicly confessing that they received “instructions from above” to frame innocent people be held accountable.
With the case against the four set to come up in court, more revelations about what actually happened in the investigative arm of the police service are expected to be revealed, and this could pave the way for more officers to be put on the dock.