A Mombasa court has found two men guilty of raping a 27-year-old woman and tying her on a railway track on February 3, 2017.
The ordeal left the woman, now 32, with permanent injuries after her lower limbs were amputated when a cargo train ran over her.
She was three months pregnant when the incident happened.
Steven Otieno Okalu and Stephen Mzee Thomas, alias Kerenje, were convicted on both counts of attempted murder and gang-rape.
Mombasa Resident Magistrate Vincent Adet said prosecutors had proved that the suspects’ intention was to have the woman killed by the train.
“By putting her on the railway track and tying her there, such that she was unable to move, the suspect’s intention was to have her crushed to death,” the magistrate said.
The magistrate also said the suspects were properly identified by the victim, who knew them by name.
The court also found that the victim was sexually assaulted and that the two suspects were positively identified as the perpetrators.
“The suspects are hereby convicted for the offences of attempted murder and gang-rape,” said the magistrate.
The magistrate dismissed the suspects defense, noting that their testimony was a scheme to circumvent the real issues in the case.
Though the woman survived the ordeal, the gruesome accident left her unable to walk and she now uses a wheelchair.
A compensation suit filed by the woman against Kenya Railways is also pending in the High Court in Mombasa.
Prosecution witness James Ocholla, a local DJ, who escorted the woman from a funeral night vigil and left her near the railway line where she was later raped, stabbed and tied to the tracks confirmed to the court that he saw the two accused men at the crime scene.
The witness said the woman had approached him that night and requested to be escorted home.
“It was around 3am when the woman came to where I was standing and asked to be escorted home,” he said.
“On reaching the mosque, I saw two guys at the railway line. I then declined to continue escorting the woman to the Timboni area where she was going.”
The witness said he decided to return to the night vigil and left the woman to cross the railway alone.
“I later got information that the woman had been raped and her lower limbs amputated after being run over by a train. I was shocked,” he said during the hearing of the case.
The witness said the woman had spotted the two suspects at the funeral on the same night, prompting her to ask to be escorted so as not to be attacked as she suspected the two might have been trailing her.
One of the perpetrators, Thomas, the woman told the court, was her ex-boyfriend and the other was his childhood friend. She said her ex-lover wanted her dead after they broke up and she refused to leave behind her son.
“My refusal to let him take away my son marked the beginning of my troubles. (Thomas) wanted the child but when I declined he swore to kill me and take away the child,” she said.
The two, she said, Thomas and Okalu had assaulted her at her food kiosk a week before the attack at the railway track.
“They walked away telling me that I will die there. As the train was approaching, I struggled to push myself out of the rails but only managed to move my upper body off the rails. The train crushed my lower limbs that were still on the railway line,” she told the court.
The woman said she had tried to alert the driver of the speeding train by screaming and throwing rocks up but it was too late. The train only stopped after she had been crushed and left for dead. BY DAILY NATION