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Five years after her husband was killed in the DusitD2 attack in Nairobi, Violet Kemunto Omwoyo is living in squalor in Somalia, embodying the bleak life of young people lured into religious radicalisation.
Squalor is the state of being extremely dirty and unpleasant, especially as a result of poverty or neglect.
According to intelligence briefs, life has not been forgiving to her, tossing her from one warlord husband to another, and only luck can explain why she has not been killed.
As the country marks the fifth anniversary of the attack, security agencies have heightened surveillance, amid sustained efforts to arrest Kemunto.
The journalist-turned-radical extremist was married to Ali Salim Gichunge who staged the terrorist attack on the 14 Riverside Complex, also known as DusitD2, on January 15, 2019.
Twenty-one people, including Gichunge, were killed.
The other four attackers were Omar Abdi Siyat, alias Samatar, Hassan, Abdiweli Gedi, alias Osman Ibrahim Gedi and Mahir Khalid Riziki, and Mahir Riziki, a suicide bomber.
Kemunto, also known as Khadija Mahmoud, was in war-torn Somalia at the time of the attack. Intelligence shows she was promised a better life if she supported her husband’s jihad campaign.
“She was privy to the attack planning and execution before Gichunge and her handler in Jilib, Somalia, assured and promised her a happy ending and advised her to flee the country through the Mandera-Somalia border before the attack,” a brief from security agencies about Kemunto reads.
Before she went to Somalia, she worked as a public relations intern at the Kenya Institute of Curriculum Development in 2014, a position she used to collect information for the terror group in the run-up to the terror attack.
With her husband gone and having fled to Somalia, Kemunto remained in the hands of al-Shabaab militants.
The intelligence brief says she married a middle-level commander in southern Somalia who later got killed during confrontations with the Somali National Army.
She later remarried a fighter in al Shabaab, but the man was killed on the Kenyan border after laying an improvised explosive device along the Elwak-Mandera road.
Kemunto currently lives in Jilib, an al Shabaab headquarters territory, where she teachers language to the children of the militant group’s operatives.
A trained journalist, having attained her journalism and communication degree from Masinde Muliro University in 2011, she joins a list of women deceived and radicalised by al Shaabab with promises of a good life.
Kemunto spent her early life in Nairobi. She attended City Primary School in Ngara, where she earned her Kenya Certificate of Primary Education attaining 350 marks, and later joined Hamdan Girls High School in Mbale, Uganda.
She worked as a manager at various mobile phone companies in Nairobi before resigning after getting married to Gichunge.