Protesters loot Chieni Supermarket in Nyeri town during the anti-government protests on June 25, 2024.
For the last two months, the Nyeri County Referral Hospital mortuary has held the body of a man who remains a mystery.
He was among many who lost their lives in the chaos of the June 25 protests against the unpopular Finance Bill 2024.
But to the hospital staff, he’s known by the last words he whispered before losing consciousness: John Thuku.
His life story remains untold. What’s clear is that he was caught in the wrong place at the wrong time - one of many who fell when what began as countrywide peaceful protests turned violent.
That fateful evening, demonstrators, angered by the bill, clashed with police outside Chieni Supermarket in Nyeri town - which is owned by Kieni MP Njoroge Wainaina.
As tensions flared, live bullets were fired, and John became one of the many casualties, sustaining two gunshot wounds.
The deceased's plight was first highlighted by NTV three weeks ago when the hospital management reached out to the public looking for his relatives.
“He was a young man, probably in his mid-twenties. He gave us a name, which we assumed was his, before losing consciousness,” recalled Deputy Superintendent Benson Ngari during the TV interview.
Teetering between life and death, he was first briefly admitted to a casualty ward before being rushed to the Intensive Care Unit (ICU), where he fought for a month before finally succumbing to the injuries on July 24.
In the weeks that followed, not a single soul came looking for John. No family, no friends, no one to mourn him. He became an unclaimed body, his presence fading as quietly as his life had slipped away. His name was just another entry on the hospital’s morgue register.
On Wednesday, October 2, a Human Rights Organisation came forward accusing the police of deliberately failing to conduct investigations into the identification of the deceased so as to conceal the government atrocity.
Vocal Africa's Executive Director, Hussein Khalid, accused the police of failing to collect the deceased's fingerprints in time to establish his identity, despite being notified.
He said that the police ought to have taken John's fingerprints while he was still alive in the ICU and presented them to the Registrar of Persons for identification.
“Now that his body has been frozen for two months, mortuary attendants say it's nearly impossible to obtain usable fingerprints,” Khalid told journalists outside the hospital morgue.
He expressed concerns that the deceased might be buried as an unclaimed body without any attempt to confirm his identity.
“Our organization is working with 23 families across the country who are still searching for their loved ones, and we don’t have the resources to travel from morgue to morgue. I cannot imagine the pain of having a loved one buried without the family even knowing,” he said.
Nyeri County Criminal Investigations Officer (CCIO) Luka Tumbo however denied claims that the police were notified about the existence of an unknown person lying at the hospital’s ICU.
He said that the DCI did not receive any notification from the hospital regarding John’s existence.
“The matter was only reported to us by a local activist, but it was already too late since the man was already deceased. When we sent a DCI officer to the hospital morgue, we realised that the body had been frozen for a while and we therefore could not collect his fingerprints,” he said.
Mr Tumbo said that the DCI Nyeri Central Sub-County Office which has been handling the matter, has since written to the Hospital Morgue asking it to extract the deceased’s DNA.
“The morgue shall preserve the DNA with the hopes that one of his relatives will come out for DNA analysis,” he explained.
According to the county bylaws, a legal expert explained that unclaimed bodies can only be disposed of after six months after the issuance of a court order.
