• Otieno and Owino picked a dead body at Jogoo Rd, took it to city mortuary and claimed his 3M insurance cash.
• The dead man shared a name with their brother who police claim died long back.
Image: The Star
It would have been a forgotten story of a man who died in an accident but for a life insurance cover.
But 11 years after he was killed, William Odhiambo’s body, with barely any flesh on it, remains in the cold until a court determines who it belongs to.
Two families are battling over the ownership of the said body, which was covered for five years by CIC Insurance.
At the centre of this saga are two brothers arraigned at a Kibera court and charged with stealing Odhiambo's body.
Calvin Otieno and Dennis Owino allegedly arrived at the scene of the accident on Jogoo Road and took it to City Mortuary.
The two brothers claim that when they found the body, they positively identified it as belonging to their brother.
Before the trip to the mortuary, the brothers sought an autopsy for their kin at the nearby Coptic Hospital.
“On taking the body, we then went to Coptic hospital where we had a postmortem performed to determine the cause of death,” Otieno said.
They took Odhiambo’s a national identification card and CIC life cover documents and immediately went to the insurers seeking claims.
CIC Insurance officer Winnie Njoki said that Otieno and Owino visited their offices in Upper Hill to enquire about the procedure for compensating victims of a road accident, covered by their firm.
“They said their brother was involved in a fatal road accident and that he had a five-year CIC cover. I personally assisted them fill the policy forms,” she told the court.
Njoki said that the two accused persons were at first paid Sh3 million and later another Sh100,000 for burial arrangements as per the insurance policy.
However, the officer said she noticed suspicious transactions after the cash was deposited into the accused's bank accounts prompting them to lodge investigations into the issue.
“We grew suspicious from the manner of transactions after the cash was deposited into Otieno’s bank account. We, therefore, involved the police to help investigate the matter,” Njoki said.
Otieno defended the quick transactions saying the money had already been planned for, according to his dead brother’s wish.
“I used the cash to buy a private school as the deceased had wished when he was alive,” Otieno said.
The owner of the private school in Donholm refuted claims that he had sold his school, affirming to the police that he bears full ownership of the institution.
Njoki also said Lukio Marende, a former finance officer at CIC was found to have been in the same bank where the accused were transacting.
He has been called to testify but has never showed up.
Police investigations uncovered that indeed Otieno and Owino had a brother with the same name as the dead man, but that he had died many years back.
According to police reports filed in court, after leaving Coptic hospital, the brothers proceeded to conduct a funeral service in Donholm estate, Nairobi.
“They even processed a death certificate which they used to claim the cash from the insurance,” Njoki said.
Otieno called their uncle Paul Odhiambo, 38, who confirmed that Odhiambo was the accused’s brother and that the two provided the funds used for the postmortem and funeral service.
“Odhiambo was my nephew, and a brother to the two. They are the one who planned and paid for the postmortem and burial costs when he died in an accident,” he told the court.
The insurer’s puzzle eventually fell in place when another family reported to the police that the body of their relative who died in a road accident along Jogoo Road in Nairobi had been claimed by people unknown to them.
The family said their relative, also named William Odhiambo went missing for weeks before they got information that he could have been involved in an accident.
According to the family, they traced the date of the accident to the last day Odhiambo was in contact with his friends and placed the date at July 18, 2008, the same date the two brothers picked a body on Jogoo Road.
Upon further inquiry, Odhiambo’s relatives learnt that their brother’s body which had been taken to City Mortuary had already been claimed by one of the brothers, who left his details at the morgue.
The family reported the matter to the police and got an order to have the body exhumed from Lang’ata Cemetery where the two brothers had buried it.
A DNA test was conducted on the body to ascertain which family he belongs to.
The doctor is yet to present the medical report in court.
The officers linked their findings to the insurance claims investigations department before they arrested the two brothers.
“We visited the Otienos home in Nyakach, Kisumu county where we discovered that the two indeed had a brother named William Odhiambo.
“Even though the two said they had buried their brother in Lang’ata, their rural home had an old grave where we were informed that William Odhiambo had been buried,” the investigating officer said.
Otieno and Owino were arraigned before Kibera senior resident magistrate Barbara Ojoo where they denied the charges.
They are detained at Industrial Area Remand.
The case will continue next month.
(edited by O. Owino)