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Terror gang let loose to police Kisii
- Details
- Published on Tuesday, 30 December 2008 18:24
None of the residents of Nyakongo area appeared to know them. Police later picked the bodies of the unidentified men and took them to Nyamira District Hospital Mortuary. This was just one of the many sites that for the last five years residents of the eight Kisii districts have had to live with.
Some of the murders are more daring and spine chilling. The murder of Boniface Machabe in broad daylight soon after he was acquitted of murder charges is one such execution. Together with eight other suspects, Machabe had been accused of murdering two chiefs in Suneka, Kisii but a court found them innocent. As he walked out of the court a happy man, Machabe was unaware that members of a gang that had been formed with the help of the Government ostensibly to fight crime, was waiting for him.
A gang of five people driving in an unmarked Peugeot 504 station wagon attacked him with machetes and killed him in the streets of Kisii town. They were unhappy that the court had freed him. Two days later, his younger brother was also brutally murdered after he defied an order by the Sungu Sungu that no burial arrangements should be made for Machabe.
Octogenarian’s punishment
Their mother, an octogenarian, was equally thrashed and her hands cut off after she tried to raise alarm over the murder of his sons. The third victim was another of Machabe’s brother. He escaped by a whisker. However, he has never returned home. Interestingly, no one has ever been arrested or questioned over these killing. It is estimated that over 500 people have been killed by this gang and no one has ever been arrested over the killings.
In the past two weeks, over five people have bee killed in separate incidents by the gang. So brazen is the gang that it combs villages in broad daylight burning houses and unleashing terror as police and other law enforcers watch. As a signature for their killing, gang members tie their victims’ hand to the back using ropes before bludgeoning them to death, says a resident of Kisii who asked not to be named for fear of being attacked. Family members of victims are always warned against mourning or interring the victims at their homes, our source says.
The gang gives explicit instructions that the dead should be buried at public cemeteries. They also target convicts who have been released from prisons, suspects cleared by courts and those released from police custody.
In Kisii, Gucha and Nyamira Districts, several families have now abandoned their homes after the killer gang issued threats on them. Sungu Sungu started as a community policing group with the blessing of members of the provincial administration. Slowly it transformed into a killer gang that now spreads terror across the region.
Residents discuss about it in whispers. No one is willing to be quoted speaking against them. Not even community leaders would not want to be quoted discussing it. Kisii District Commissioner, Benjamin Njoroge acknowledges that several people have fled their homes fearing the gang. “We don’t have exact figures but I am aware that a number of crime suspects are on the run after the community turned against them,” Njoroge said in an interview with CCI.
The DC noted that security had greatly improved in the area.
“This is partly because hardcore criminal have fled the area and are taking refuge elsewhere,” he said. The situation in the region is so grave that freed convicts plead to remain in jail rather than face the wrath of the killer gang. Inmates at the Kisii GK Prison claim that a big number of their former colleagues have been killed by Sungu Sungu in the past two years.
“We are now fearing that we shall meet the same fate when we complete our sentences,” Yusuf Bin Onyango, a remand prisoner, told Kisii Resident Judge Daniel Musinga when he recently toured the facility. “I am very comfortable here. Even if I am released, I will not go to face the lynch mobs. They have eliminated my family and they are now baying for my blood,” said another inmate.
Prisons’ worry
Prison authorities are now worried that the killings are negating their efforts to rehabilitate prisoners. “The community should have them back because we have rehabilitated them,” says the outgoing Kisii GK Prison boss Julius Adero.
“These people are reformed. Some of them are very good people. I feel very stressed when I am told that they have been lynched,” adds Adero. Late last year, remandees threatened to boycott hearings at the Kisii law courts. These threats forced the then Kisii Resident Judge Jean Gacheche to visit the prisoners to assure them of protection.
The prisoners also wrote to the then Kisii DC and the resident judge. “According to information from our relatives our lives are in danger. All ex-convicts have been killed,” they wrote. They demanded to know whether the Sungu Sungu vigilante group was an arm of the Government security organs. “If the people of this region do not have a place for ex-convicts and remandees, then we are ready to make the prison our permanent home,” they said.
CCI investigations established that some offenders in the prison had bailable offences but unwilling to go home for fear of being killed. Foreign Affairs Assistant Minister, who is also the Kitutu Chache MP, Richard Onyonka acknowledges there is a security problem in the region. He says the Sungu Sungu issue needs to be addressed by government before it gets out of hand. “I have been discussing this issue with the DC but so far nothing has been done,” Onyonka says.
He lamented that the problem is deep rooted in his constituency saying: “I will issue a comprehensive report on the same later.” His Nyaribari Chache counterpart Robert Monda says local leaders were studying the situation keenly adding they would issue a joint statement as Kisii political leaders later.
A Kisii based human rights lawyer, Wilfred Omariba says the OCPD and Nyanza PPO should be in a position to tell what was happening in relation to the Sungu Sungu operations. “The law is not followed in Kisii. What is going on is illegal and the police should tell us what is happening if not so then they are responsible,” he charged adding that there was a serious security lapse in the area.
Warning shot
“Arrests of crime suspects should be executed by the police and in case of civilian arrests they should be handed over to the police,” he says. Last Friday, Kisii DC, while addressing a public baraza at Kiogora location, said 10 members of a community policing group in the area would be investigated.
This came after members of the public complained that some community policing members were using their positions to engage in crime. “We don’t understand how people charged with the responsibility of overseeing security turn into a terror gang. We want to inform them that they are doing it at their own risk,” Njoroge warned.
He warned that the groups were not formed as a hideout for criminals, but were initiated for the purpose of assisting the police in identifying criminals in the area. Residents of the area feared that the members of the group could have turned into Sungu Sungu. Njoroge noted that some of the members have been carrying out their activities with impunity adding they had gone to the extent of demarcating people’s land and also eloping with married women. “They were not selected to solve domestic matters and land issues among other things on behalf of the provincial administration but to boost security. I’m also a ware that some of them claim that they are only responsible to the police commissioner and nobody else,” he added.
