By Eric Ayiro,
KAKAMEGA, Kenya, May 23- A Kakamega court has recommended murder charges against four police officers and a bar owner suspected of beating a reveler to death.
Principal magistrate Eric Malesi heard the inquest to determine the cause of the death of Raymond Mulanda,40, on December 16, 2019.
The magistrate regretted that the incident could be “another sad statistic on rampant police brutality in the country”.
“Police officers are humans just like the rest of us, how they turn brutal after attending Kiganjo training and wearing uniform is a question that needs to be discussed. I rule that the four officers and the bar owner who called them to arrest Mulanda should be charged with murder,” he said.
He went on: “Indeed the pathologist who looked at the cause of Mulanda’s death concluded that the multiple internal injuries he suffered on the head were not consistent with motion trauma as the officers in question testified in the inquest.”
The four, constable Musa Juma, Francis Kaimeti, Duncan Wafula, and senior sergeant Michael Chergut had testified that Mulanda jumped from a moving police vehicle while being taken to Kakamega Central Police station and succumbed.
Wafula testified that after the fall they (officers), out of mercy, extended a helping hand by rushing him to the hospital, a line that was hard to sell to the court.
“On the material day, I was on routine patrol together with my colleague Kaimeti when we were alerted to a man (Mulanda) causing a disturbance. We went to arrest him but he refused to board a motorbike to the station,” Wafula said.
He went on: “He protested that we were in civilian clothes and that the bike had civilian registration so he couldn’t be arrested by civilians. We called for reinforcement from Kakamega Police Station and he (Mulanda) agreed to enter a police vehicle, but he nonetheless jumped on the way and we rescued him while he was bleeding in the ears and took him to hospital.”
The court doubted the argument by Wafula and his colleagues saying it was unlikely for a man in handcuffs, sandwiched between two police officers to overpower them and jump out of a moving police vehicle.
“Besides, the pathologist even indicated there are little chances the multiple internal head injuries and that on his burst testicle were caused by jumping from the police vehicle, which in my estimation is not as high, could be one metre high,” said Malesi.
Dr. Dickson Mchana, the pathologist who examined the body said in his report tabled in the course of the two years inquest that the head injuries were because of “blunt force trauma following a fall from a height.”
Another witness in the inquest Ian Otieno said; “I saw Mulanda kneeling outside the Balozi Bar where he was arrested while in handcuffs as the four police officers stood by telling him leo tutakuonyesha (We will teach you a lesson today).”
Mercy Ondeng a bartender at the bar said Mulanda became chaotic after his phone got lost in the bar and caused a commotion which led her boss Dennis Rosana to alert the police.
After the arrest and subsequent death police booked Mulanda at the police and Kakamega referral hospital morgue as an unidentified male who was found dead on the road, a thing that made his family protest leading to the inquest.
The court ordered the four officers and Rosana the bar owner to be remanded at Kakamega Central Police Station awaiting fro the State to issue a date for their murder trial.
At the time of his death, Mulanda was married to Shakila Mukoya and they had two children.
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