• Child Welfare Society says foreigners often seek to take Kenyan children abroad.
Image: VICTOR IMBOTO
Police have denied abducting a child from a Westlands apartment on Friday, April 5. They say they are now looking for the three-year-old child to return him to Daisy and Matt Mazzoncini who are his legal guardians.
Police have however given conflicting accounts of the abduction where 11 men took the child without a court order and without identifying themselves. The Mazzoncinis became the child's guardian in April 2017.
Initial reports were that the abduction was conducted by a 'Mr Baraza' of the DCI. However yesterday Nairobi DCI chief Benson Nyakwaka said the men who took the baby were not from the DCI and were from the Serious Crime Unit.
But the serious crime boss denied that his officers were given such an assignment last week Friday. He said police were now looking for the child to return him to his parents.
An official from the Child Welfare Society told the Star yesterday that the “child rescue operation" was purely a security operation that the CWS did not know about. He declined to be named because he is not the CWS spokesman.
He also declined to explain how he was aware it was a security operation and still claim his department was not aware of it.
The Mazzoncinis have now appointed a new lawyer James Singh, to replace Danstan Omari. Singh told the Star that sources have confirmed that police officers who seized the child.
The original 'rescue' was tweeted by DCI as their successful operation and recorded in the OB book at Spring Valley police station. Police there advised the Mazzoncinis to check for the child at Muthaiga police station who then referred them to Gigiri police station in a fruitless search.
The child has serious medical problems and needs to take anti-seizure medicine for epilepsy every eight hours. He was found dumped as a newborn in a plastic bag at a Kiambu prayer centre in 2016.
“As a first step, we want the child to be on his prescribed medication and then have him returned to the mother because this is what is in his best interest,” Singh said.
"The police should not play ignorant of the operation yet they even refused to allow our client to record the case at the Spring Valley station. They referred us to Kiambu DCI and later DCI headquarters," he added.
The Mazzoncinis said they chose Singh because they wanted “an advocate with specific knowledge and experience in family law.”
The couple has spent close to Sh11 million on the treatment of the child.
The Childrens Welfare Society official who denied knowledge of the operation said that they wanted the legal guardianship awarded to the couple to be reviewed “to ensure that all the procedures required in the process were complied with.”
“We have always asserted that the moratorium on adoption by foreigners is in full effect,” he said. In September the Mazzoncinis met the Labour CS Ukur Yattani and officials, including Irene Mureithi, the CEO of the CWS, to see if they could get an exemption to adopt the child after having been his guardian for two years.
The Child Welfare Society of Kenya is a state corporation for the care, protection, welfare and adoption of children. Its vision is to see all the children leading a happy and fulfilling life.
The couple has applied to the Children’s Court for permission for the child to travel abroad for specialized medical treatment. They offered at their expense for an official from the Childrens Department to accompany them as a chaperone.
The CWS official accusing the couple of blocking efforts to independently review the health of the child.
“The mother has on two occasions refused to produce the child when required for independent medical review. They keep postponing, insisting that this person or that must be there,” he said.
“Foreigners first seek, mostly successfully, the foster care, then escalate it to legal guardianship and then seek to adopt, citing the child’s best interest because they have formed emotional bond,” he said.