RECENT KILLING OF A RETIRED SENIOR POLICE OFFICER PERCEIVED TO HAVE TOP SECRET ABOUT THE SIX ICC SUSPECTS.
Writes Leo Odera Omolo
The usually extremely authoritative and reliable Kenyan daily has come out with puzzling allegation that the killers of a retired senior police officer have been executed in covert police operation.
In its Saturday edition the NAIROBISTAR for the second time in a week reported that the murders of former Kenya Police College commandant Benard Kimeli Kemei, who was found dead in his Nairobi house on April 28, were reportedly executed in a covert police operation.
It says it has gained its information from a multiple sources that the three men suspected of shooting and stabbing the ex-police chief, were shot dead and their bodies mutilated with acid were later dumped on the Nairobi-Magadi road in Kajiado district after the murder.
The body of the fourth suspect, according to the STAR picked up by detectives from the Special Crime Unit of the Kenyan Police, was retrieved from Ndakaini Dam in Thika district on April 30 and take to Thika district hospital mortuary.
No identity documents were found on all the four bodies.
The paper reported quoting its unnamed source as telling its reporters that the four dead men were allegedly picked up by police in Githurai and Dandora estates within Nairobi City after detectives traced one of them through his cell phone. The cell phone in question is alleged to have been used to make a call to the deceased Mr Kemei a few hours before he was found dead.
The STAR report says the man was arrested and he allegedly led the police to the other suspects who were also arrested and questioned before they were executed. However, the paper’s story is also intriguing when it quoted the police source as saying that the police were yet to zero in on the actual motive for Kemei’s murder. But in an earlier report the same paper had made it clear that the death of the murdered former police chief could be connected to the incriminating evidence he had presented to the Waki Commission, which investigated the post election violence of 2008. And that the deceased evidence former the best part of the evidence ICC Chief Prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo intend to produce during the trial of the Ocampo Six at the ICC trial of the suspect who masterminded and financed the post election violence in Kenya.
The Kenya Police has so far fiercely refuted the allegations contained in the two reports, which have appeared in the press for the second time within one week.
The ex-policeman had been stabbed twice in the abdomen and shot twice in the torso. His lifeless body was stretched out on a sofa seat in his living room at the Muguga Green Flats in Westland’s suburb of Nairobi. Neither his neighbors nor his son who was living in the adjacent servant quarters herd of anything like commotion coming from the main house.
The house was not broken into and neither was anything of value stolen. The deceased was buried in His Kabiyet Division in North Nandi district last Friday. The police on the other hand said they were pursuing the led that Kemei was murdered because he had information which could incriminate some former and current security chiefs who were covertly involved in dealing with the 2007-08 post election violence.
The report says the police as well as the people associated with the Waki Commission confirmed that the late Kemei had actually appeared before the commission and some of the testimony he presented before the commission in camera formed part of the evidence that the International Criminal Court Chief Prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo intends to use in his prosecution of the six suspects he has identified as bearing the greatest responsibility for organizing, financing and planning the violence.
A close relative of the late Kemei who claim to know of the existence of the classified information had confirmed this to the STAR.
“He collected some of the information from his own trusted junior officers in the field in the period leading to, and during elections and after President Mwai Kibakji was declared the winner. The information included the selective manner used by some partisan police commands to deal with election violence in the volatile Rift Valley Province.”
“Kemei had been ordered by some people in the government to provide undercover and uniformed police officers from the Police College to do some dirty work against some ethnic communities which he refused,” said the relative who claimed some of the document with the information had been taken away by Mr Kemei’s killers.
The source said orders were allegedly issued to Kmei to release “the idle policemen” at the police college to go out and assist deal with the violence. “The decision about which of the trainees were going to take in quelling the violence was done in a selective manner because it favored one ethnic group”, says the report.
“There are forces in Kenya who are fearful that the officer’s evidence cloud have been dangerous to some of the Ocampo Six. These people would not have wanted the late Kemei to testify or provide any documentary and photographic evidence to the ICC or even a local tribunal if one is established,” said another source attributed to unnamed a senior office who worked with for the Waki Commission. But a lawyer who had represented the police the Waki Commission has denied suggestions that Kemeli could have been murdered because of what he knew of the post-election violence.”Kemneli was never a witness. He never presented a memorandum to the Waki Commission and was never intended to be a witness by anybody. He did not have any information that could make anybody scared. This is misinformation by Ocampo who has lost his case to try and enhance the conditions for the six suspects. He wants to use the report of Kemei’s murder to claim that witnesses are being killed,” said, reported the STAR quoting the lawyer Evans Onari as saying : Ocampo, meanwhile has filed another application in which he is asking the ICC court not to compel him to present the witness statements he has so far collected to the suspects’ lawyers claiming doing so would jeopardize their safety.
The Police Commissioner Mathew Ireeri had categorically denied there was any link between the three executed men and Kemei’s murder which was still actively being investigated. The Commissioner’s spokesman Charles Owino, denied the three men had been executed by police and said their deaths were being investigated.
Kemei’s abrupt retirement in 2008 raised concern with Keiyo South MP Lucas Chepkitony asking a question in parliament to know why Kemei had been retired out of the service. But responding to the question the Assistant minister of State for Internal Security and Provincial Administration Simon Lesirma told parliament that Kemei left service on March 3, 2008 after he had attained the mandatory retirement age of 55 years. He added that the officer had not asked for the extension of his contract to continue working for the police.
The latest claims and counter claims have thrown everybody into darkness which has shrouded the crucial issue of murder and the impending ICC trials.
Ends