- Zachary Nyaora Obadiah was arrested on Monday after entering Tanzania.
- He is suspected, with a group of other riders, of sexually assaulting a motorist on Wangari Mathai Road in Nairobi.
Image: DCI
Boda boda fugitive Zachary Nyaora Obadiah will remain in custody for 10 more days pending investigations after his dramatic arrest at the Kenyan-Tanzania border on Monday.
Obadiah was picked up by detectives and whisked to Nairobi where he was arraigned before Milimani senior principal magistrate Robinson Ondieki.
The magistrate directed the police to hold Obadiah at the Gigiri police station where the other co-accused are currently being held.
Obadiah is the main suspect in the assault of a woman motorist along Wangari Maathai Road on March 4, 2022.
Police have been on his trail with authorities tracking his phone calls leading to his arrest on Monday.
After learning he was wanted by authorities over robbery with violence and assault in the city, the suspect dumped his mobile phone at a garbage in Mukuru slums as he escaped a police dragnet.
Detectives recovered the gadget belonging to Obadiah from a dumping site in the slum moments after he had escaped on March 7.
He escaped the dragnet via a sewer duct in the densely populated settlement. From there, he took a boda boda to a bus stop in the city centre as he headed for Kisii.
He took a bus headed for Kilgoris but avoided going to his rural home.
On the way, he borrowed a mobile phone from a passenger who was seated next to him and called his mother informing her he was headed for Kilgoris.
His mother apparently advised him to surrender to authorities but he told her he would consider that later.
Detectives from the Directorate of Criminal Investigations had profiled and monitored all the persons Obadiah was likely to call.
He called his mother at least three times as he traveled to the place where he was finally arrested.
“He knew he was wanted and he used strange numbers to call his relatives to inform them of his movements,” an official aware of the probe said.
The suspect was Monday nabbed by detectives from Nairobi Area Operations at the Kenya-Tanzania border in Migori.
Detectives said he had crossed into Tanzania when they alerted their counterparts. He was brought to the Isebania One Stop Border Post for grilling before the team left for Nairobi.
The suspect had been on the run and communicated with his relatives in Kisii while on the move towards the border area.
He was among a group of boda boda riders who confronted and harassed a female driver in the city in an incident that sparked a nationwide crackdown on the operators.
DCI said the suspect was scientifically placed at the crime scene before he was traced down to Mukuru Kaiyaba informal settlement.
“Using digital forensics, the sleuths working with cybercrime experts at the DCI National Forensic Laboratory, placed the suspect at the scene of the crime scientifically and went after him this afternoon deep in Mukuru Kayaba informal settlement,” police said.
Police have so far established that while on the run, he called his mother and another man believed to be his relative.
All the owners of the mobile phones he used were traced and told police the caller was a stranger to them and was in the public service vehicle they were in when he sought their help to make the calls.
Police showed them a photo of the suspect they had and they all confirmed it was Obadiah, the wanted man.
They however said he used a facemask to hide his face all through. In one instance, he informed his mother he had arrived in Kilgoris but would not go home and was headed for Kehancha, which is at the border of Kenya-Tanzania.
It was then that police alerted their counterparts at the border to be on the look.
A relative had also asked him to surrender and suggested they use a lawyer in the process.
But police said this was one of the ways to throw them off balance in their trail. The officers were informed he had crossed the border and intercepted him on Monday.
He had a bag with five clothes that he intended to use while in Tanzania where he intended to stay for a while to wait for things to cool off before coming back.
The suspect is also said to have been positively identified on the video capturing the sexual assault incident by his wife and other relatives in his rural home.
The DCI says they are still looking for his accomplices and want them to surrender saying they too have been identified.
The other 16 accomplices were last week Thursday produced in court and police allowed to hold them for two weeks as they conduct their investigations.
-Edited by SKanyara