Forest Road attack: Did police fail to help Zimbabwean diplomat?

Boda menace

A screenshot of the incident.

Photo credit: Courtesy

New footage has emerged showing snippets of what transpired when a Zimbabwean diplomat was sexually harassed by a group of boda boda riders, leading to a nationwide crackdown on the sector.

Video shared by a TikTok user named Benson shows the woman standing outside her car while making a call on her mobile phone as a mob of boda boda riders shouts at her.

The riders can be seen groping her as she tries to stop them. All this while, there is a traffic police officer present. From the brief 48-second clip, the policeman does not appear to intervene to stop the assault.

Someone can be heard threatening that her Nissan X-Trail will be destroyed.

“Hi gari yako itachomwa (Your car will be torched),” he shouts. 

The clip appears to have been taken moments before the now-viral clip of the shocking assault, which surfaced earlier in the week. In the new footage, the woman is still fully clothed unlike in the other footage that showed that boda boda riders had torn her garments off and left her half-naked. She also still has her mobile phone, which she later reported was stolen.

Police report

A report filed last Friday at the Parklands Police Station shows that a boda boda rider blocked her car abruptly, forcing her to crash into it and leaving the rider with a broken leg.

The motorist stopped a few metres from the scene but was mobbed by a group of riders, some of whom stole her mobile phone and cash.

This forced her to take off but stopped a few metres away. The riders raced after her and blocked her car. They then opened her car door and sexually assaulted her, with some of them robbing her of her personal effects as she screamed in terror. 

Meanwhile, someone in the crowd was recording her ordeal.

Half-naked, she was later rescued by a traffic police officer, who was alerted by other motorists.

Zachary Nyaoga Obadia, Forest Road assault mastermind

Zachary Nyaoga Obadia. He has been identified by police as the mastermind of a gang that sexually harassed a motorist along Forest Road.

On Tuesday, detectives unmasked the identity of the main suspect in the assault as Zacharia Nyaora Obadia. They say he was at the scene of the crime at the time of the attack, even though he is registered to a boda boda association that operates from Hazina.

He is on the run even as the police hunt for him across the city and in his rural home in Kisii.