• Moments after Kenei sent his wife the text message, his phone picked a signal at a different location within Imara Daima.
• Government pathologist Johansen Oduor yesterday said frequent visits to the officer's house could have interfered with the integrity of the scene.
Image: ANDREW KASUKU
Police Sergeant Kipyegon Kenei could have been murdered.
Detectives probing his mysterious death appear to conclude that Kenei, who was attached to DP William Ruto's Harambee House Annex office, did not commit suicide as earlier claimed. They are trying to join the dots to establish how Kenei's phone location changed minutes after placing a call to his wife and if he received or called any other person.
The officers have been tracing his last moments. A DCI officer aware of the investigations told the Star in confidence that the last call Kenei made to his wife at 9.41 pm on February 18 was from his house. It lasted 53 minutes.
Using advanced phone triangulation methods, the officers established that moments after Kenei sent his wife a text message, his phone picked a signal at a different location within Imara Daima, estate and not his Villa France house.
The same signal picked his M-Pesa transaction of Sh35,000 through Equity Bank's mobile money service at 12.25 am on February 19.
“The change in location especially the difference of at least two-and-half hours between 9.52 pm and 12.24 am are crucial timeliness in providing clues to what transpired,” the DCI officer said.
During the time of the M-Pesa transactions, which included Sh10,000 to his father, Kenei could not respond to text messages from his wife over the unusual transfer of money to her phone. His phone went off at around 7.301 am on February 19, with all his social media platforms deactivated.
Kenei worked on the second floor of Harambee House Annex where the DP's office is located. He was expected to record a statement with the DCI in connection with the probe into the Sh40 billion fake arms deal involving former Sports CS Rashid Echesa. He was at work on the day Echesa and his co-accused are said to have visited the DP's office in the planning of the military tender.
Meanwhile, chief government pathologist Johansen Oduor yesterday said frequent visits to the officer's house could have interfered with the integrity of the scene. Oduor led a team of other pathologists to his single-room house on Villa Franca estate in Imara Daima, Nairobi. He said the scene was contaminated and that could have bungled investigations.
With the house having been cordoned off as a crime scene since the body was discovered on February 20, only police officers had the leeway to visit.
Oduor's team was at the scene yesterday to collect swabs for further toxicological analysis as part of the postmortem investigations to determine whether the officer's death was a homicide or suicide. Kenei's family doctor was also present as well as officials from the government chemist and crime scene police.
Their visit was also to fill some gaps that postmortem and lab work alone could not fill up. But the chief pathologist decried mishandling of the scene. He said his work of piecing together facts to unpuzzle the death has been complicated numerous folds.
"There will be a lot of waiting from them [investigators and pathologists]," he said.
Oduor, however, appeared to settle the question of where the officer died and asserted that the house was the primary crime scene, though leaving some window for change of that conclusion by the pending lab reports.
"We think that [the officer's house] was the primary scene where everything happened from what we have seen. However, remember there are many other things coming up. There are lab tests, there are swabs, which can tell us if it was there or not. I cannot answer that 100 per cent, but the thinking is along that line," he explained.
He told the Star that the floor of Kenei's house had a carpet, which could have absorbed blood. Kenei's clothes were soaked in blood besides splatters being on the walls and the ceiling, he added.
A postmortem had concluded that the officer had a pistol put under his chin at skin contact and the trigger pulled, killing him at once. The bullet exited through his forehead.
Oduor said the government was not leaving anything to chance and has approached the probe in a multidisciplinary manner to determine who pulled the trigger and for what motive.
"The laboratory will give us what they have seen... so that we can give a conclusion on what happened to the late Kenei," he said.