Death in the wilderness: The police officer who would not rest in peace

The news last month came as fast and dry as it always does. Two men had been shot dead inside a ranch in Laikipia and police suspected they were poachers, so would we be interested in pursuing the story?

For a newsman, any clue is always potential for a big story, and so, on a cold Sunday morning, I climbed into a company Isuzu D-Max and ventured out into Solio.

For many, and especially for the police, this was but just another story about poaching. It had to be. Because, for some unexplained reason, poachers had managed to make it to news headlines for 12 uninterrupted months despite concerted efforts by the authorities to stem their bloody trade.

Many were cooling their heels in remand prisons across the country over the smuggling of game trophies even as we struggled to keep pace with a Kenya Wildlife Service Land Rover ahead of us. So, yes, this had to be another poaching misadventure.

But as I sat inside the car, I couldn’t help but wonder what it was about Solio that attracted such incompetent poachers. Too many deaths were being reported here. Six in two months, and one person was missing. It seemed to me that the KWS servicemen stationed here were better marksmen than those in other parts of the country. Either that, or something very fishy was going on.

If you have been to Solio, you know that the track alongside its straight perimeter electric fence stretches to eternity. And inside that fence is what, at least to me, heaven looks like. Virgin savannah grass sprouts from the earth and spreads, like a mammoth Persian carpet, to the horizon.

Scrubs and bushes, in their pristine indigenous splendour, hug each other like kids on a basketball court, glistening in the morning sun as we drive by to see two dead men.

A herd of black rhinos grazes near a dam, unperturbed, unlike us, by the deaths of those two men. Everything is calm. Calm and cool. But over the hills, somewhere in the distance, two men spent a cold night under a shrub. Dead.

After what seems like forever, the Land Rover screeches to a halt and a man jumps out. We follow suit. A few metres ahead, a number of police cars have formed a beeline that seems so out of place here.

Their blue-and-white paintwork breaks the extraordinary monotony of an otherwise good neighbourhood, while the jungle green of the KWS cruisers blends effortlessly with life as vestal as it gets. Everyone is armed. And tense.

Between two thickets just a few meters from the electric fence, two middle-aged men lie on their backs about two metres apart. I move closer to take in the bloody scene. Their hands are stretched straight along their bodies and their eyes stare into the heavens. In their eternal sleep, they look so calm. So ‘cool’. And so cold.

There are no ghastly wounds visible from a distance as one would expect. Instead, only their chests have bloodstains. Death, for these two, came quick. Bullets to the chest. Each. Inside the heaven that is Solio.

A G3 rifle lies on the right-hand side of one of the suspects, who is wearing a jacket an a pair of black trousers. The other is in a broken suit that looks too elegant a piece to wear to an animal park. “Look at this one,” a KWS warder breaks the tense, mortuary-ish silence. “He goes poaching while dressed as if he is headed to church. ’Must be an amateur.”

An amateur indeed, we all agree as we gather around the two men. Otherwise he would have dodged the bullet that felled him. Near the rifle is a GSU-issue bag with the inscriptions GSU-74 on the side. A long sword and a bunch of keys lie next to the bag, while a matatu receipt, in its whitewashed glory, shouts for attention nearby.

“How come there is no blood all over the scene,” I try to informally interrogate one of the officers. “Why no broken twigs here and there? There must have been a scuffle, right?”

“You ask too many questions,” the man shrugs me off and walks away as a battery of journalists arrives at the scene. We will have to wait for the official police statement from John Kemboi, the area commander. Anything we hear from another source should be taken with a heavy serving of salt.

Mr Kemboi is the Kieni West OCPD, and after gathering all the information he needs, he beckons that he is ready. A team of KWS and GSU officers guarding the ranch ambushed three people in the forest at around midnight, he starts

“There may have been three groups, judging from the number of gunshots and the direction they came from, but three people were cornered, two were shot and one escaped,” he says, adding that the suspected poachers may have been targeting rhinos as they were near a dam where the animals graze in the moonlight.

Later, Central region police boss Larry Kieng identifies one of the dead suspects as Constable George Nderitu, who had been attached to the Central Bank Police Unit. The other is a Mr William Gichui, but nobody knows what he does.

Referring to the slain constable, Mr Kieng then sends a warning to officers not to engage in criminal activities as they will be dealt with “ruthlessly” or “we will eliminate them one by one”.

Then, the briefing done, we pack our bags and leave Solio. And the story sort of dies.

But something keeps nudging me to go back and turn a few stones. Who, for instance, was this wayward police constable George Nderitu? Where did he come from? Did his family ever suspect him of being a poacher? Wasn’t the salary he was earning from Vigilance House adequate enough?

My interest in the story takes me to the Nyeri PGH Mortuary, where, on a Friday, I find a number of Constable Nderitu’s relatives hurdled at a corner outside. They seem to be in a foul mood. We all are, what with the foul smell wafting from the morgue and the occasional wailing of a woman unable to hold back the tears.

Mzee Naftali Nderitu addresses us first. He is the father of the late Nderitu, and he too was once a police officer. It is clear that he questions the circumstances under which his son met his death. There were burn marks and gun powder around the entry points of the bullets, and this, from his experience in the force, can only mean one thing: his son was shot at close range.

“Why didn’t they arrest him and take him to court?” he asks. “Who will protect the police?” His last question is laden with meaning. And, for a brief moment, it finally dawns on me that the middle-aged man we found cold in a thicket in Solio was once a respected member of the society, a law enforcer who now, in death, is accused of breaking the very laws her swore to protect and uphold.

As the sad realisation sinks in, Dr Moses Njue, who was once the chief government pathologist but is now hired by the family, moves in to give us details of his post-mortem examination. He confirms the burn marks claim and reports that Constable Nderitu received four bullets to the chest, almost at the same spot. This, he explains, means that the subject was stationary when the fatal rounds hit target.

STATIONARY TARGET

“The bullet wounds did not show consistency with those sustained in a fierce gun fight because they were very close together,” says Dr Njue. “This can only be possible if they were fired at a stationary target. The first shot should have knocked him over and the other bullets should have hit elsewhere. This shows he had been restrained at one spot.”

As he concludes, the doctor brings up another disturbing question: “Why were doctors not called to the scene before the bodies were removed? What was the hurry to take him to the morgue? He was dead anyway!”

The presence of a doctor at the scene, he points out, would have answered many questions about how the suspects died and the time of death.

“It baffles me how we conduct investigations in this country and this is very costly in the sense that innocent people are put to jail while the guilty get away with it,” concludes Dr Njue.

The pathologist’s findings, I had hoped, would settle this matter for me. But they raised even more questions. As I chased the story, somewhere in the Wamura location of Laikipia County, a family was planning to lay to rest their loved one. And, on January 29, Constable Nderitu was lowered to his final resting place without the fanfare expected of a police officer.

The ceremony was low-key. There were no former colleagues from the force to give him the usual gun salute. He had served as a police officer but died a thug. The force would have none of him.

The constable is buried, but now the dirt is slowly inching towards the fan. While central region head of police operations Ephantus Kihura says investigations into the matter are still ongoing, Constable Nderitu’s friends and relatives have started to question the poaching theory.

They say their friend and son was lured to his death, and that, contrary to initial police reports, the man had actually been ferried to the killing spot in a car. The matatu receipt we found at the scene, they argue, is not valid at all.

As the mystery deepens, the Independent Medico-Legal Unit says it will provide a lawyer for the family of the late Nderitu in case it wishes to argue its case in a court of law.

If, indeed, this finds its way to the corridors of justice, it will be the first among many such killings that have been reported in the area over the past few months.

When we first carried the story in the Sunday Nation last month, a Mr George Kigio wrote to us saying his brother had been killed in a similar way earlier. Mr Kigio said he had read the story with “utter disbelief” because, in September last year, his brother, Harrison Kamau, and three other people, including a game ranger attached to the Tsavo National Park, had been “executed in similar style” as the men in the story”.

Harrison Kamau’s body, Mr Kigio informed us, had six gunshot wounds and burn marks all over his body when they found him at the Makindu Hospital Mortuary a week after his execution.

The family recorded statements at Mtito Andei Police Station and opened an inquest into the circumstances surrounding the death. “I know that my brother and the other men, one of whom was an ex-military serviceman, were lured into the park by some people who included game wardens and I would be glad if you ran an investigative piece on these deaths,” urges Mr Kigio in the letter. “Most probably we might get to know exactly who is behind these killings,” he adds.

BODIES DUMPED

Deep in the Mt Kenya forest, residents narrate similar tales. They claim that many people are being reported lost only for their bodies to be recovered dumped in the Sirimon area of Mt Kenya Forest, about 90 kilometres from Nyeri town.

In late October, 2013, for instance, more than 80 residents combed the forest looking for the body of Geoffrey Njenga, a farmer who has since disappeared without trace. He was in the company of three friends whose naked bodies were later recovered in the forest on November 1, 2013.

The KWS public relations officer, Paul Udoto, says any matter involving the death of a person is handled by the police regardless of the circumstances, while the Director of Criminal Investigations, Ndegwa Muhoro, says any such deaths must be investigated and the matter can only be disposed of by way of public inquest.

In the meantime, Constable Nderitu lies in a grave in Laikipia. And, sadly, dead men tell no tales.

Do you have information that could help unravel this case? Have you or yours suffered the trauma of losing a relation through such mysterious deaths? Send your reactions to [email protected].