At least 29 people, including government officials, were arrested in a major crackdown on gangs behind the forgery of various documents.
The operation was staged by multiple agencies in an intelligence-led exercise in the past week and spread from Nairobi to other rural towns.
Three chiefs were among those detained over the fiasco. They were involved in, among others forging of citizenship documents, police said.
The team in the exercise said the forgery gang was exposing many people and the country at large to many dangers.
“Citizenship documents must be protected, and that is why we are determined to crack this gang,” said an official in the operation.
Also among those nabbed is a terror suspect who had obtained a crucial document, officials said. Those who helped him in the process are being pursued. This was after intelligence showed a number of suspects were behind a series of forgeries of documents, which are at times presented as genuine ones.
Some of the documents have left many, including financial institutions, with huge loans to service. The documents include land title deeds, birth certificates, identification documents, and government letterheads.
“They have also defrauded unsuspecting Kenyans of millions of shillings. We are pursuing more suspects involved in the cases,” said one official aware of the investigations.
The individuals were detained at various police stations ahead of the planned arraignment. The detectives said a number of investigations by a multi-agency team are already ongoing to nip the scam in the bud.
Some security officials have also been accused of colluding with aliens to get into the country and also failing to repatriate foreigners declared by courts as unlawfully present in the country. Police spokesman Michael Muchiri said they are expanding the operations.
“These people need to know what awaits them. It amounts to among other things, economic sabotage,” he said.
He added the intelligence-led operations had destroyed a number of fake documents recovered. In a separate case, a suspect had, among other things, forged the signature of a top government official for businesses.
The hoodlum was nabbed at the Ngoigwa area within the Thika West Sub-County.
Despite being a civil servant employed as an economist at the State Department for Cabinet Affairs, the suspect chose to moonlight as an architect of counterfeit power, police said.
His latest stunt was the sloppy crafting of a forged letter allegedly sanctioned by a senior government official. Walking in like a man who believed in his own con, he brazenly delivered the letter to the National Police Service Commission (NPSC), forwarding a list of “state-recommended candidates” for police recruitment.
Preliminary investigations have unearthed a familiar pattern.
The suspect is already on suspension, thanks to a previous criminal case before the Kahawa Law Courts where he allegedly forged another letter, this time promoting himself to the rank of director and transferring himself to the State Department for Housing.
Realising detectives were closing in, he went dark, switching off all his known numbers, envisaging he had slipped off the radar.
