Dr Robert Ouko, Minister of Foreign Affairs, was shot dead on the morning of Tuesday, February 13, 1990, 25 years ago today. Some time that morning a local herdsboy found Ouko’s burning body at the foot of Got Alila Hill, just 2.8km from his Koru farm, although this was not reported to the authorities and the body was not officially found until nearly four days later after a police search near his Koru home.
Within 48 hours of President Moi’s public announcement that Dr Ouko had been found dead, authorities had requested that detectives from New Scotland Yard in London fly to Kenya to investigate the crime.
On the afternoon of their arrival on February 21, Detective Superintendent John Troon of New Scotland Yard’s International and Organised Crime Branch accompanied Dr Iain West, a British Home Office Forensic Pathologist, as he conducted an autopsy on Dr Ouko’s body. In the following days they visited the site of the where Dr Ouko’s body was found.
From their investigations Troon and West concluded that Dr Ouko had been murdered, shot once in the head and his body set on fire. Significantly they concluded that Ouko had been killed where his body was found, a view they never deviated from over the years. He was not, therefore, killed at State House, or anywhere else.
Some of the other conclusions reached in Troon’s report turned out to be more problematical however.
Troon concluded that the answer to the motives behind Dr Ouko’s death ‘lies in the circumstances of the Washington visit and the allegations surrounding the BAK company involvement, and the Molasses Project’ whilst accepting that these two theories were based on circumstantial and “somewhat tenuous evidence”, and “hearsay”.
The Washington trip theory, that there had been ‘some sort of dispute or disagreement’ between Dr Ouko and another leading member of a Kenyan delegation to Washington DC for a ‘Prayer Breakfast’ in late January 1990 was subsequently and fancifully developed into a story whereby Dr Ouko had met with President George Bush Snr during the visit, enraging President Moi and Energy minister Nicholas Biwott and leading to Ouko being ‘sacked’, sent home on a separate flight and ‘banished’ to his Koru home. Great story, absolute nonsense.
Testimony from those on the trip, both Kenyan and American, statements by President Bush’s lawyer and his Presidential Library’s archivist, together with information contained in previously unpublished telexes between the US Embassy in Nairobi and the State Department in Washington, prove beyond doubt that there was no meeting between Bush and Ouko on the Washington trip.
There is also not the slightest evidence of a dispute and there is overwhelming evidence and testimony that Dr Ouko travelled back on the same flights as the rest of delegation, was not sacked, was not banished, his passport was not taken away and nor were his driver or bodyguard removed from duty.
The Kisumu Molasses Project theory, that Dr Ouko’s attempt to revive the Kisumu Molasses plant in his constituency in 1987-88 was thwarted by Cabinet colleagues seeking to get kickbacks from a rival bid to rehabilitate the plant has also been shown to be baseless.
The allegation derived from the testimony of a Marianne Briner-Mattern of Swiss-German origin and to a lesser extent her partner, an Italian by the name of Domenico Airaghi. Together they were ‘directors’ of BAK, a company that was engaged by Dr Ouko, with Cabinet approval, to help rehabilitate the Kisumu Molasses plant.
Troon accepted their testimony because he assessed them as “truthful and honest witnesses” who operated “under a reputable company”. It subsequently emerged however, that Airaghi had been convicted by a Milan Court in 1987 of ‘attempted extortion’ and that Briner-Mattern was in effect his accomplice.
As for their “reputable” company, it had no expertise in molasses, had never traded and nor had it ever been properly incorporated in Switzerland as a company whilst Dr Ouko was alive.
Briner-Mattern’s allegation that rival companies were put forward for the Kisumu Molasses plant revival was proven to be untrue, all of the companies involved were introduced to the project by Airaghi and Briner-Mattern.
As for the claim, for which Briner-Mattern was the only source, that Dr Ouko was preparing a report into high level corruption relating to the Kisumu Molasses Project at the time of his murder, no report was ever found and by the time of the PSC Briner-Mattern told the investigation that documentation supporting her allegation had been stolen when she was in Tanzania and taken out to sea in speed boats.
A quarter of a century later another of Troon’s findings should be implemented, that ‘a full and impartial investigation’ should be implemented into the murder of Dr Robert Ouko. Truth and justice demand it: without that there can be no reconciliation.
Martin Minns is authoring a book on the murder of Dr Robert Ouko