A Mombasa family will not be making merry this Christmas as they continue to search for their son, who has been missing since Monday.
Mwinyi Mwinyi was picked up from his home in Utange at 7pm by armed men believed to be police officers. He was bundled into a waiting black Subaru car which sped off.
The whereabouts of the 41-year-old father and husband are yet to be determined and a search in hospitals, police stations and mortuaries in the area has not yielded anything.
Hussein Khalid, the executive director of Haki Africa, the lobby that has been helping the family get the word out, told the Star that the man was the sole breadwinner for his family and “keeping him away hurts his family a great deal.”
Eyewitnesses claim the four men identified themselves as police officers but did not say why or where they were taking him.
“All this is the work of the anti-terror police because it bears the hallmark of their habits, especially in the Coast region. It is their modus operandi,” Hussein told the Star on Wednesday.
The police unit, he said, operates in a clandestine manner by picking up those it suspects to have terror links by financing, sympathising with or being part of radical terror groups.
But Hussein said there were no signs Mwinyi had such links and that even if he had, the police should accord him the right to be visited by his lawyers and his family.
“We have looked for him in police stations and mortuaries here and there is nothing. Not even an OB about him.”
Mwinyi joins the list of victims of enforced disappearances this year, some of whom have been lucky to resurface and join their families.
Islamic scholars Abdiwahab Sheikh Abdisamad and Hassan Nandwa are examples. They resurfaced but declined to speak about their experiences.
Nandwa was the lawyer for convicted terrorist Elgiva Bwire, who had served a 10-year jail term but when he was released, he also disappeared. He has yet to resurface and security agents have put a Sh20 million bounty on his head, claiming he is underground and planning retaliatory attacks.
Another case is that of Ethiopian businessman Samson Teklemichael. He was abducted in a broad daylight from his Bentley at a traffic jam in the city.
The trader, who has been in the country for 16 years, has never been found as all efforts by his wife, including going to court, have not yielded much.
Edited by A.N
