01 July 2016•Update: 11 July 2016
By Magdalene Mukami
NAIROBI, Kenya
Amid accusations of police involvement, the bodies of a lawyer, his client and a driver were found on Friday, over a week after their unexplained disappearance, in gunny sacks in a river in Kenya’s Eastern province.
Police said that the body of lawyer Willie Kimani, who used to work for the International Justice Mission NGO, and driver Joseph Muruiri were retrieved from Ol Donyo Sabuk river, while a third body believed to be that of the lawyer’s client slipped back into the river, with efforts ongoing to retrieve the body.
Separately, after receiving a petition from the Law Society of Kenya (LSK), Kenya’s police inspector general on Friday ordered the arrest of three police officers suspected to have kidnapped the lawyer.
The three missing men had attended a court session at the Mavoko law courts in Machakos County, in a case concerning a motorcycle driver who was allegedly shot in the arm by a police officer at a traffic stop.
Kenya’s Daily Nation newspaper reported, “Some of the mortuary attendants said the bodies were found with their hands tied behind their backs. The records at the morgue show that the cause of their deaths was drowning.”
On Thursday, lawyers in the Kenyan capital Nairobi held a protest demanding that the police do more to locate the three men, adding that cases of lawyers disappearing without a trace are on the rise.
In a statement one day before the bodies were found, Human Rights Watch said, “Should police officers, or other government agents, be involved with or implicated in depriving the men of their liberty and concealing information about their whereabouts, their actions would constitute an enforced disappearance, a serious violation of human rights for which there is no justification.”
