Police killed 157, 10 disappeared in 2020 - Missing Voices report

A group right lobbies want the government to develop a panel to probe allegations of brutality, killings and disappearances blamed on police.

Missing Voice, a project of leading right lobbies including IJM, Amnesty International, Kenya Human Rights Commission, ICJ among others, reported on Wednesday that it had documented 157 deaths and 10 disappearances linked to police.

For example, Vitalis Owino left his pregnant wife as the dusk started in late March last year to buy supper in the Nairobi neighborhood. He did not make it back.

Curfew had just been imposed. His wife narrates in the report that she only received a call from her sister-in-law about her husband, asking her to verify reports of his death.

Viewing the body next day, she found Owino had "bled from the head, the ears and had suffered a rupturing of the ribs."

"Next thing I knew, I had long passed out and spent several hours at a nearby dispensary. While I was out, carrying his corpse out of the streets had turned a violent affair. The police came and had to call for reinforcement," she said.

For 59-year-old Asha Yusuf Chai, the police raid of March 28 at Bamburi area of Kisauni to enforce curfew, has left her a permanent mark.

Vending her fish, she heard people shouting "police, police" and before she could take off, huge boots and clubs were landing on her body indiscriminately.

She lost a number of teeth and some of them sunk deeper in her upper jaw, affecting her eye nerves. It took a miraculous reconstructive surgery by the doctors to relieve her pain and save her life.

"I used to enjoy eating ugali with fish but now I cannot afford it, we are forced to eat ugali with salt or lemon juice as vegetables because none of my children are working," she said.

The lobby says the 157 cases were a result of 131 separate incidents and that 83 per cent of the cases have not been investigated.

A paltry 3.5 per cent of the cases have the alleged perpetrators arrested and 7 per cent are under investigation by IPoa.

According to the lobby, 2020 was one of the deadliest years since it started keeping the records in 2018.

In 2019, it said, it verified and published 144 cases of police killings and enforced disappearances in the country, most being in Nairobi and Mombasa.

But police spokesman Charles Owino said, "Some of the statements the human rights groups are making have no moral standing," complaining that figures cannot be independently verified.

"Some of the deaths attributed to police are not true and unfair mischaracterization of the officers," he said.

Owino said the lobbies have not differentiated the people killed by armed criminals and those who were shot by police justifiably.

"This country has armed criminals who also kill people. Does the human rights people tell you that?" Owino posed.

He explained that the police had its own system of verifying if the deaths caused by police officers are lawful and justifiable and any officer found to have violated the law held accountable.

On enforced disappearance cases, the spokesman said that most of the cases, especially in Kwale were done by criminals posing as anti-terror police officers.