Our husbands ‘hired to kill Moses Mpoe’

Senior government officials and members of former Cabinet minister Mbiyu Koinange’s family allegedly hired two men to kill Maasai land rights activist Moses Mpoe, the High Court heard on Tuesday.

Ms Alice Adamba and Ms Tabitha Wanjiru told the High Court in Nakuru that their husbands — Mr Martin Karanja Mbugua and Mr Fredrick Mungai, — were later felled by police bullets soon after killing Mr Mpoe in a bid to conceal the real culprits.

The widows mentioned former secretary to the Cabinet, Mr Francis Kimemia, Criminal Investigations director Ndegwa Muhoro and Kiambu Governor William Kabogo, during defence hearing before Lady Justice Hellen Omondi.

They claimed Mr Kimemia and Mr Kabogo were interested in the case while Mr Muhoro’s name was used by a member of the Koinange family to calm down and reassure the Mpoes about the murder case.

Former Nakuru police chief Johnstone Ipara and his CID counterpart Abdi Salat were accused of interfering with witnesses with the intention of implicating certain members of the Koinange family.

PROMISED MILLIONS

They said their husbands and another man, identified as Mjaluo, were promised Sh2 million each and land as payment for killing of Mr Mpoe.

The two were testifying in a case in which Koinange’s youngest wife Eddah Wanjiru Mbiyu, her step-son David Njuno and five others are charged with the murder of Mr Mpoe and Mr Parsaaiya Kitu on December 3, 2010, at Soilo Junction on the Nakuru-Eldoret Road.

“Njuno and herself are being framed for the murders because we opposed the sale of their family land to Kiambu Governor William Kabogo,” the widows said.

They claimed that one of Koinange’s sons, Mr David Waiganjo, who is also an administrator of the 4,296-acre Muthera Farm, paid their husbands to kill Mr Mpoe and later used the police to eliminate them.

Mr Mbugua was reportedly killed by police at Nakuru’s Kaptembwa Estate a month after Mr Mpoe’s murder while Mr Mungai was shot dead in Kericho in April 2011.

Mjaluo, who took the two on his motorbike, was also killed by police in Kericho in 2012.

FEARED FOR HIS LIFE

Ms Adamba, who was being examined by lead defence counsel Paul Muite, said her husband told to her that he had killed Mr Mpoe with his gun and that he feared for his life.

“Police raided our house in Kaptembwa, killed my husband even after handcuffing him and took away his gun,” she said.

She said members of the Mpoe family, among them the Mr Mpoe’s son, had called her to a meeting twice where they begged her to change her statement to read that Mr Sigei had hired the gun from her husband to commit the twin murders.

“He told me he was sure Mbugua had been killed by police and that he feared for his life and that of his Luo friend.

“This was because Mr Waiganjo had refused to deliver the Sh2 million payment and the promised land.”