Vinnie, Morris Mabior, Felix Musili, Bernard Kabongo, Yutman Mgaza, Isaac Ngombo Lewa and Charles Mwangi.
These are among hundreds of Kenyans killed or disappeared by police but who have never got justice for years.
Despite sustained agitation by civil society groups over the years for prosecution of rogue police officers involved in alleged extrajudicial killing, not much fruit has come of it.
Analysis of data compiled by various human rights entities over the last decade shows that there is a wide gap between the agitations by the lobbies and the actual prosecution of suspects, mostly police officers, by the criminal justice actors, effectively letting them free to commit the alleged offences again.
In 2023, Missing Voices recorded 125 extrajudicial killings, 153 in 2022, 201 in 2021, 168 in 2020 and 145 deaths in 2019.
After police are accused of killing someone extrajudicially, families go through the familiar motions of agitation by civil society and a promise of prosecution by the state.
Missing Voices, a collection of human right agencies including Amnesty International, Internal Justice Mission, Imlu and Haki Africa verify and document cases of extrajudicial killings and enforced disappearance. They say that they have recorded up to 1,350 such deaths over the last ten years. Enforced disappearance figures stand at 350.
But only a paltry 28 prosecutions have been mounted in all the verified cases, raising the alarm among civil society actors on the effectiveness of their approaches, the responsiveness of criminal justice system in combating perceived police impunity and whether the promises by key actors to take action are empty.
The import of the delays in the prosecution is that the families of the killed or disappeared victims have to contend with the anxiety and the pain of loss with no accountability.
For example, Vinnie, a young man in Mlango Kubwa area of Mathare, was gunned down on February 14 last year.
Police confirmed killing a youth in the area whom they described as a notorious criminal on their radar for months.
The cops said they ambushed him after trailing him.
“… his shots missed our men who had taken cover in a drainage trench, prompting the section commander to return the provocation with lethal accuracy,” the DCI said.
According to the DCI, Vinnie was a member of an emerging gang that had been involved in several robberies in Pangani, Mathare, Eastleigh and Huruma. He had snatched a motorbike from a boda boda rider, leaving him without a source of income.
“The fallen thug, who was on our radar for the past few months, had violently snatched a motorbike from a boda boda rider, robbing the man who was fending for his family their only means of livelihood,” the DCI said.
Police claimed to have recovered a pistol loaded with two rounds of ammunition and five spent cartridges from the scene of the shootout.
Police claimed that they shot Vinnie dead when he refused to surrender and instead shot at police indiscriminately. His body was promptly removed from the scene and taken to City mortuary before protests that turned violent erupted.
With the police sustaining the narrative of the victim as a hardcore criminal, there are no known efforts to help Vinnie’s family.
Wilfred Olal, the coordinator at the Dandora Social Justice Centre, believes that the narrative by police needs to be challenge because they are not innocent actors who need to be taken at their word.
The law requires that the Independent Police Oversight Authority conducts investigation of any round of ammunition fired by police to ensure that the law enforcers do not misuse force.
It is not clear if the officers involved in this raid reported it to the police watchdog authority for investigation.
Morris Mabior is another case of killing allegedly by cops but it's not clear whether his family has been served justice.
The Sudanese, who sought asylum in Kenya in April 2021, was kidnapped from his Nairobi home along Kangundo Road. His wife Angelina Aliet said that five men and a woman trailed her husband from a nearby shop to the house and demanded that she opens the door. After ransacking the house, the group left with Mabior.
Olal said Ipoa has become another weak link in the fight against police impunity due to its perceived inactivity and delays in getting the files of accused cops moving.
“Ipoa used to be effective in communicating with some of grass roots actors in this space and pushing the files to have the rogue cops held accountable. Currently, we don’t know what is happening and they are totally inaccessible,” he said.
Multiple efforts by this writer to get comment by Ipoa chairperson Anne Makori bore no fruit as she neither picked the calls nor responded to message queries.
