Kenya’s police service has once come under scrutiny over how officers investigate crimes reported by wananchi.
While officers from the Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) should be commended for how swiftly they arrested Collins Jumaisa Alusa, the main suspect in Mukuru kwa Njenga, Nairobi, killings, their actions have also left many questions unanswered.
Mutilated and dismembered bodies, whose number the authorities put at nine, trussed up in sacks, were hauled out of a garbage dump in an abandoned quarry.
The discoveries have thrown another spotlight on the police, particularly the DCI, and added more pressure on President William Ruto, who is struggling to contain a crisis over widespread anti-government protests that saw dozens of demonstrators killed.
Kenyans have in recent weeks become skeptical about almost all information coming from the Kenya Kwanza government or the National Police Service, a fact demonstrated yesterday with the outright dismissal of a preliminary report issued by acting Inspector General of Police David Kanja and DCI director Mohamed Amin.
Amin’s statement raised several questions. If indeed Alusa had killed 42 women and dumped their bodies at the quarry in two years, has any of the families of the dead reported to the police cases of missing persons and how were they handled?
The police must tell Kenyans how many such cases were reported, the police stations that received the reports and the progress of any investigations.
Amin, as the country’s chief detective, owes Kenyans an explanation on why reports of missing ordinary persons are hardly investigated by his agency, which is said to be quick to take up any matter involving deep-pocketed personalities. Do ordinary Kenyans matter less to the DCI?
More intriguing is how the killings and dumping of bodies could continue in a place within the capital city without the knowledge of the authorities, starting from chiefs, police, members of the local community and the National Intelligence Service.
The arrest of Alusa should not therefore mark the end of investigations into the Kware killings. The authorities must go a step further and bring to book all the individuals who slept on their job as the killings continued.
