The results of postmortems carried out on the bodies of two children found dead inside a car at Athi River police station are inconclusive, Government chief pathologist Johansen Oduor has said.
The bodies of Alvina Mutheu 3 and Henry Jackton,4 were found on July 1 after they went missing on June 11.
Oduor said, “We tried looking for any injury which can give us a clue as to what caused the death but we didn’t see any injuries so as at this moment we are unable to say what exactly caused the death of the two children because of the level of decomposition."
He was addressing the press at Chiromo Funeral Parlour on Tuesday.
“Remember when someone decomposes, there is loss of tissues so what you could have seen when a body is fresh, you will not have a privilege of seeing and in forensics you report what you see,” Oduor said.
He said that details of the death of the two will become clear when full investigations are conducted.
“We are relying on a lab which we have taken samples to analyse. We are also relying on police to do their investigation so that we can come to the bottom of this case,” he said.
Those involved in the postmortem include Oduor and his two assistants Grace Midigo Grace and Donna Nyamuga, DCI homicide head Martin Nyuguto, government chemist analysts, Crime Scene Investigators and family advocate Haki Africa.
Areas most affected by the decomposition include most parts of the head including the face and the chest.
Oduor said there were no bruises on tissues or fractures in the bones.
“When I look at the bodies it’s very very difficult to say exactly how many days the bodies were in the car, however we could see some maggots and some pupae.”
“Maggots come from flies…a fly lays eggs, after that it turns into larvae then pupae then adult. We usually rely on those because we can say definitely these people were there from three to four weeks, reason being all those stages are there,” Oduor said.
The maggots and the pupae have been collected and taken to forensic entomologists to offer more clues into how long the bodies stayed in the car.
Haki Africa executive director Hussein Khalid called for an inquest into the matter.
The discovery of the bodies of the two minors at the police station raised questions into who might have killed them and why.
Detectives have already conducted multiple intensive interviews on police officers at Athi River police station to unravel how the bodies found their way into the the car which had been locked and keys handed over to police on duty.
The parents have also been questioned.
Focus now shifts to the government chemist analysis process which could take weeks going by precedent and the fact that operations have been scaled down due to the coronavirus pandemic.
