On March 5 last year, Director of Criminal Investigations George Kinoti held a press conference on the murder of Sergeant Kipyegon Kenei, an Administrative Police officer attached to the Deputy President’s Harambee House Annex office.
Kinoti declared: “It was cold murder, which was well executed, stage managed but unfortunately our experts here are smarter than the cold killers.”
This was the definitive conclusion of an investigation that he, Kinoti, had pledged to personally lead.
The DCI had reached this sobering conclusion after allegedly examining all pieces of evidence at the murdered officer’s single room in Imara Daima, and elsewhere.
Using standard but effective ballistics and blood sputter analysis techniques, the country’s top detective demonstrated how the murder unfolded and speculated on the possible trajectories of the bullet and its shell casing. He belaboured to tell Kenyans what most of them already knew — that Kenei did not commit suicide but was murdered.
This fact was corroborated by government pathologist, Dr Johansen Oduor, whose report stated that the officer died from a single gunshot to the head. If Kinoti is to be believed, phone triangulation had put three individuals, all men, at the crime scene, and that there was a fourth man, an accomplice, and an employee of a leading telco — who erased Kenei’s phone records as well as his digital footprint.
Multibillion-shilling arms deal
While Kinoti did not expressly claim so, he presented this case as an elimination of a potential witness [Kenei to an alleged multibillion-shilling arms deal involving Deputy President William Ruto and former Cabinet Secretary Rashid Echesa.
He blamed the DP’s office for not checking on Kenei when he failed to report to work. This was trivial and contradictory since the same DCI also acknowledged that Kenei did not show up to record a statement as agreed — something that should have led him, Kinoti, and his investigators, not the DP, to look for the officer.
There was more. Kinoti claimed Kenei’s body was discovered by a neighbour, who neither saw strangers in the compound nor heard a gunshot. DCI further claimed Harambee House Annex had initially denied his detectives access to video footage, and when they did, they discovered that the DP had misled the country regarding the length of time Kenei had spent with Echesa and his allies at the office.
There are reasons to believe Kinoti was engaged in shadow boxing and a smear campaign against the DP, which was neither surprising nor unexpected.
Conscripted newspapers and television shows echoed and amplified claims made by Kinoti even when no evidence had been presented.
Predictably, those out of government, like ODM leader Raila Odinga, and those within, like Jubilee secretary-general Raphael Tuju, intensified their attacks, even threatening to impeach the DP for some unspecified, certainly yet-to-be-proven transgressions.
Paid bloggers not only assailed the DP, they also penned articles that portrayed Kenei as a “crook in uniforms”. For instance, a leading newspaper ran an anonymous article, on March 13, 2020, under the header “Sergeant Kenei was too rich for an AP officer”. No one was interested in the truth.
There is admirable tenacity, clarity, and boldness with which the DP handles those out to derail his agenda. In this instance, he took to Twitter and wrote: “The truth must be found on why, how, and who killed Sgt Kenei. The family, ODP and Kenyans want the truth and justice and culprits held to account. The drama, distortions, convenient half-truths and the smear campaigns in sponsored headlines amount to criminal cover up.”
Nefarious agenda
When he showed up to bid his fallen officer farewell in Solai, Nakuru, a visibly emotional DP was clear: Kenei had been murdered as a warning to him. He also revealed that he was aware of what his detractors were planning. He was [aware] of the nefarious agenda of those who had repeatedly claimed the man “would not be on the ballot”, come 2022. As ominous as the DP’s words were, they were not without precedent in the annals of Kenya’s politics — especially at the highest levels.
Kinoti did himself no favour by disclosing he had intimate knowledge of the men involved in Kenei’s murder. Their identity, as well as of their accomplice at the telco, remains unknown. They’ve not been arrested to help investigators resolve this case, a reality that is not lost to the public, and one which I seek to stress.
DCI has not shared any evidence captured from recovered phone records — not that government could not retrieve data from Safaricom anyway.
Since President Kenyatta’s regime has failed to demonstrate goodwill regarding the heinous murder of its uniformed officer, there can only be one reasonable conclusion: that Dr Ruto is believable. Kenei was assassinated by his political opponents as part of the “Stop Ruto campaign”. BY DAILY NATION