NAIROBI, Kenya, Jul 10- A family is in distress after their kin who had been arrested by the Anti-Terror Police Unit (ATPU) strangely went missing without a trace.
It all started when Taimur Kariuki Hussein, a resident of Watamu in Malindi, was arrested on June 11 by the ATPU officers near Lamu.
“The officers said they had been following him for a while,” his sister, Fauziya Hussein told Shahidi News.
On Monday June 14, he was arraigned, but the charges were dropped four days later on June 18.
“He was transferred to Nairobi for further investigations and was later produced at the Kahawa Law Courts, where the officers sought for more time to conclude their investigations,” Fauziya said.
On June 28, she said that ATPU dropped all the charges levelled against her brother, with the court issuing orders that he be released without conditions.
But on the fateful day when he was released, “after a final exit interview with ATPU officers,” he went missing.
The agreement according to Fauziya was that he would be picked from the ATPU offices in Nairobi by his mother while in the company of his lawyer.
But on arrival, “my mum was told that he was released about 30 minutes ago.”
“Why didn’t he wait for us or even call, as he would every time, he got a chance?” she wondered.
His phones were however left with the ATPU officers for further interrogation, but he was to collect them on July 2. He never did.
The family efforts to get evidence that he was indeed released has hit a dead end, after the ATPU said they had deleted the CCTV footage of him leaving their premises.
This was after the family made an application in High Court, demanding that the ATPU produce “him dead or alive.”
The only evidence that he left the premises according to Fauziya is an Occurrence Book (OB) number.
“We are not convinced. They should tell us where our brother is,” she said. “I just want to know my brother is fine.”
She also wondered why the ATPU, “would delete the CCTV footage after every 24 hours?”
Where is Hussein? Is he safe?
Those are the pressing questions the family is seeking to have answers to. The 39-year-old has been missing for 12 days.
“Where is my brother? Was he abducted?” she posed. “The police said he was to come to my place in Nairobi, which I doubt since he has never been there. I have been waiting, and he has never come.”
She said her brother is a calm person, “and not an extremist. He is innocent.”
The country is lately witnessing increased cases of disappearances, some said to be enforced according to lobby groups.
This year alone, between January and June 23, a recent report by the Independent Medico-Legal Unit (IMLU) said it had monitored and documented 59 cases of alleged police brutality.
They included 5 cases of death while in custody, 36 cases of summary execution, 8 cases of enforced disappearance and 9 as a result of alleged torture.
Nairobi County tops with the highest number of executions recording a total of 19, followed by Mombasa with 5.
Out of the 59 cases, thirty-six were allegedly perpetrated by police officers.
In February, 2021, declassified United Kingdom documents put the ATPU on spot, for allegedly being involved in rendition of terror suspects and other human rights abuses.
“They are fully aware of their criminal culpability so they move in under the cover of darkness, or in disguise, so that their identity is not known… in essence they operate like a criminal gang,” Kenyan public interest lawyer Willis Otieno explained during an interview with the UK publication that did the exposé. “So it is difficult to pinpoint exactly which officers were in charge of that particular operation.”
The National Police Headquarters denied all the claims.
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