Families raise alarm as extra judicial killings soar in the city
By Nzau Musau | Saturday, Jun 24th 2017 at 22:27
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Participants during community dialogue session on extra-judicial killings at Shauri Moyo’s Young Men’s Christian Association hall in Nairobi. [Photo: Moses Omusula, Standard]
At Shauri Moyo’s Young Men’s Christian Association hall, Lilian Achieng’s cry for justice reverberated across the hollow auditorium arresting the attention of all and sundry.
Delirious and sorely hurting, she hurled out her grief in staccato sentences that aroused more heat than light in the hall. Years later, the grief of losing her 16-year-old son to a ruthless cop knows no composure, is boundless and is piercing… inachoma! (hurts)
“At 16 years, jamaneni! (honestly) At 16 and eleven bullets as I watched, yawa! Why couldn’t he arrest the boy and lock up him even for 100 years?” Achieng, popularly known as Mama Jaluo bleated before human rights activists, police representatives, Shauri Moyo community and international observers.
Achieng had been warned to take her son away from the estate but she had nowhere to go. “I am a widow and an orphan. I sell vegetables for survival. Where was I supposed to take him? When I took him to the police station and asked them to keep him for 29 years until he reformed, they wouldn’t give a hoot,” she narrated.
Like all mothers, mama Jaluo testified, she wanted her child to turn out well.
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“Seeing my child die in so cruel a manner, felled by a person I knew and with so much potential to change hurt me big. I think I grew white hair on that fateful day, stress!”
Surrendered
Mama Jaluo’s tale is no different from the tales of tens of other mothers who jammed seven “dialogue sessions” conducted by a network of seventeen civil society groups led by International Justice Mission (IJM) in Nairobi slums.
The month-long sessions culminated on Friday with a commemoration of one year since the brutal murder of IJM lawyer Willy Kimani, his client Josephat Mwenda and taxi driver Joseph Muiruri by suspected police officers.
In Mukuru, Stella Nthenya remembers last year’s Easter holiday eerily. Police burst out on a group of eight youth, her son included, and ordered them to surrender.
She claimed her son surrendered but the officer, at one fell swoop, downed them.
“He’s still free, the cop, and harassing me…”
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Ms Nthenya is better off. Esther Wambui’s son was arrested by police in 2014 and disappeared for good, without a trace. She’s been to every morgue, since she’s double sure he was killed, but still hasn’t found the body.
“All I want is his body to bury it. I will never find respite, until I bury him,” she told the Mukuru session, oozing raw motherly pain.
Evelyn Ilusa’s son was killed in the field while playing. She claimed her son was not a thief. Esther Wangui’s brother was killed in Eastleigh by police. Her mother was shocked on receiving the news that she collapsed and died.
For Munira Mohammed, grief struck in doubles. Her two children- Dave and Chuku- went missing in 2010 after being threatened by a well-known ruthless cop in the area. She said the cops and her family keep threatening and harassing her.
Mary Mbole depended on his son who was lying in a cold mortuary floor as she spoke at the Kawangware forum. He was fished out of the house by cops, led by his friend, taken to another friend’s house and executed in cold blood.
In a faint, dying voice, she pleaded with the people who attended the forum: “Please pray for me.”
Nelly Luchesi witnessed police accidentally shoot a pregnant woman in Highrise while pursuing thugs. She died on the spot and left behind three children. She testified that in Kibera, three to five young men, felled by police, are buried every other week.
Am with pamba on this