Bedridden moment that offered clue to a long winding murder mystery

The search for Mbaraka Karanja's body in the Eldoret municipal cemetery. The remains were never found. FILE PHOTO | NATION GROUP

What you need to know:

  • His family applied for the writ of habeas corpus for police to either charge him in court or set him free.
  • Police appeared in court to say they had shot him dead two months earlier and buried him without informing his family.
  • The court ordered they exhume the body and produce it in court.
  • What followed was high drama.

Kenyans have come to view August as the month of bad omen.

It is the month we lost first President Jomo Kenyatta.

The month of the August bloody attempted coup, and the month of so far the worst terrorist attack on our soil.

By the way, could it be the reason we also made it the month for our usually acrimonious elections?

August 1997 came with bad news even for the wider world. We mourned the death of the gracious lady, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, now Saint Teresa.

Elsewhere, the British lost the charm and charity of Princess Diana.

It was also a bad month for me.

Driving downhill at night on Naivasha Road just before Dagoretti Corner, I suddenly saw an old pick-up truck abandoned in the middle of the road with headlights off.

I tried emergency braking but too late. I rammed into the truck. I passed out.

GREAT PAIN

When I regained consciousness, I was staring at the ceiling with excruciating pain and blood all over my clothes. I noted I couldn’t move my right leg which was as heavy as lead. My right hip joint had dislocated and my lips disfigured with stitches.

All around me were people in hospital gowns and the place smelt of surgical spirit and urine. “Where is this?” I asked my neighbour. This is Kenyatta National Hospital casualty ward. “How did I end up here?” 

“Well, I heard the nurses who wheeled you in say you were involved in a road accident and brought here by good Samaritans.”

I felt like screaming but thought it wouldn’t help ease my great pain and shock.

Kenyans are very nice people until they are incited by insane politicians. Despite their own troubles, the patients in the ward were very kind to me.

One offered me two boiled eggs. Another gave me a pain-killer as another brought me a glass of water.

NURSE NOT HELPFUL

The nurse on duty was also helpful. She immediately telephoned my good friend Ms Virginia Nderitu who arranged my transfer to the Mater Hospital and secured me an orthopaedic surgeon, Dr George Museve, to handle my broken leg.

Every morning when Dr Museve came to see me in my hospital bed where I stayed for two weeks, he would find me reading the day’s Nation newspaper with a book on my bedside.

“I can see you have remained a journalist even in your hospital bed”, he remarked one morning.

“True, Bwana Daktari. Trust that if something newsworthy happens here, I will report about it from my hospital bed”, I replied with a light touch. Never mind my leg was fastened to the bed and couldn’t move an inch. The bed was also my library, dining, and washroom.

MORNING ROUNDS

It was while doing his morning rounds one morning when Dr Museve asked me whether I remembered the case of one Mbaraka Karanja 10 years earlier.

“Yes I do”, I told him, to which he disclosed: “I was the Eldoret medical officer of health (MOH) who supervised exhuming of the graves at the Eldoret Cemetery in search of Karanja’s body.”

Certainly that drew my interest and a conversation ensued.

This is the story of Mbaraka Karanja.

He was a farmer and businessman in Kiambu. One day in April 1987 police arrested him in connection with a series of armed robberies.

FAMILY EFFORTS

For two months, efforts by his family to trace him at police stations in Kiambu and Nairobi where they thought he could be held hit a snag.

The family turned to next available option.

They went to the High Court and applied for the writ of habeus corpus which demands that police either charge the arrested person in court or set them free.

Police appeared in court to explain why they couldn’t comply with the court order.

They owned up that they had two months earlier shot Karanja dead in a forest in Eldoret after he allegedly tried to flee from lawful custody.

The police version of events was that the suspect had promised to show them where illegal guns used in a series of robberies were hidden in Eldoret but, in the process, he’d attempted to escape.

On shooting him dead, they took his body to the Eldoret Hospital mortuary where it was recorded as an unclaimed body and disposed of at the Eldoret Cemetery.

DECENT BURIAL

High Court Judge Derek Schofield expressed disgust at the police action which he termed “callous in the extreme”.

He ordered the body be exhumed and handed over to the family for independent post-mortem and decent burial.

In two consecutive days, Kenyans were treated to the charade of police opening up 19 graves at the Eldoret Cemetery but to no avail.

Colleague Benson Wambugu, who covered the drama, tells me it was a grisly affair opening a grave after another and scrutinising bodies in various stages of decomposition.

The police supposedly were looking for a body with a bullet wound in the forehead and dressed in red inner wear, blue jeans trouser, and a brown leather jacket.

OPEN UP GRAVE

Court writer Wambugu recalls: “They would open up a grave; put the decomposed body on a make-shift stretcher and the pathologist would look for the said bullet would. It was a troubling spectacle.

At one point somebody suggested that the smell of a cigarette would ease the strong stench all over the place.

Nation driver and I had a packet each and saved the day by lighting a stick for everyone — including the non-smokers.”

It all turned out to be an exercise in futility as Karanja’s body was never found even after disturbing 19 spirits of the dead.

Embarrassed by the bad publicity the saga was giving Kenyan authorities, then already on the spotlight over human rights abuses, Chief Justice Cecil Miller on “orders from above” took away the case from the no-nonsense Justice Schofield and transferred him to an upcountry station.

The judge declined and quit Kenya to be the Chief Justice of Gibraltar in the Cayman Islands. As expected, the Mbaraka Karanja affair quietly disappeared from the courts and the headlines.

***

“Exactly what was the story behind the story?”  I asked Dr Museve during the conversation at my hospital bed.

“The digging of the graves was just a show to buy time with the courts”, he told me. “The police knew very well Karanja’s body was not there.”

He proceeded to give me the account of events as they unfolded.

Two months before the Karanja matter exploded in the media, officers from the Criminal Investigations Department (CID) in Nairobi dropped an unidentified body at the Eldoret Hospital mortuary where he was the medial officer in charge.

The body had a bullet wound on the forehead. A day or two later, the same officers came and took away the body without saying a word.

For Dr Museve, the matter rested there since it is police who had brought the body in the first place, then taken it away and nobody had made a claim to it.

GRAVE DIGGERS

The matter would resurface after the court ordered that Karanja’s body be produced in court.

Out of the blue, grave diggers at the cemetery claimed they were positive that in April, they received two bodies from Eldoret Hospital which were labelled No 1059 (Mbaraka Karanja) and No 1060 (Unknown body).

They were even very clear where the two were buried. But when the two graves were opened, none belonged to Karanja.

Dr Museve disclosed to me that months after the matter had petered out, he asked a friend in the security what the Karanja saga was all about.

The security officer replied: “Sorry Doc that we made you spend a whole day examining decomposed bodies when we knew that man wasn’t buried there.”

So where was the body? It had long been set ablaze by the police.

The security officer divulged to Dr Museve that the CID had credible evidence that Karanja was a dangerous criminal but were frustrated the courts kept setting him free.

And so orders had come from high up the CID that “we just bump him off and handle the consequences later.”

End of the story.