Masten Wanjala's escape a shame to police

The lynching of suspected serial killer Masten Wanjala yesterday morning in Bungoma, more than 400 kilometres from the police cell he had escaped from two days earlier, has raised serious questions about Kenya’s criminal justice system.

Mr Wanjala who confessed to killing 12 people, most of them young girls, and drinking their blood, escaped from his cell at Jogoo Road Police Station hours before he was set to take plea.

His disappearance after 91 days in custody, had caused anxiety within the police only for him to end up dead in the hands of irate villagers. And since dead men tell no tales, the 12 families of the people he confessed to killing may never get justice. 

The only thing left in the case that gripped the country for the last three months is how such a high value prisoner escaped from a police station and travelled all the way to his home village without being detected.

The official explanation is that Mr Wanjala was spotted at 6am yesterday by a bodaboda rider in Mukwheya village. The rider then informed his colleagues, who grouped and started to trail Mr Wanjala.

“‘It's Masten, we used to play soccer with him,’ the children I was ferrying to school said,” Mathews Lukorito, the bodaboda rider, said.

After realising that he had been spotted, Mr Wanjala ran to a nearby homestead hoping to shake off angry villagers who were baying for his blood.

Alfred Wekesa, the owner of the homestead where he was cornered inside a bathroom, said he was called by his wife who told him that the serial killer had been lynched. Within minutes, what had promised to be one a thrilling murder trial ended as dramatically as it had begun. 

Mr Wanjala was arrested on July 14 in Kitengela, Kajiado County after five years on the run. Since then, the Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI), in its current style of documenting every arrest with flair, has been keeping the country informed of every of progress Mr Wanjala took detectives to the graves where he had buried his victims.

In many ways the DCI and the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) were not on the same page over the number of murders committed by Mr Wanjala. While the DCI said it had enough evidence to show he was at the scene of 10 murders, the DPP said on the day the suspect escaped from a police cell that he was due to be charged with three counts of murder.

Yesterday, DCI wanted police officers Philip Mbithi, Boniface Mutuma and Precious Mwende, who were on duty at the police station when Mr Wanjala escaped, be charged with aiding a person to escape custody among other crimes. But the DPP applied for the officers to be detained for 14 days as he moved the case to the Independent Policing Oversight Authority at the last minute. 

The DPP’s application to detain the officers was declined as they were released on a Sh100,000 cash bail each. 

And after treating the country to so much drama with promises of justice, the DCI yesterday had a difficult time explaining what had exactly happened.

“The DCI was determined to ensure that the suspect faces justice in a court of law for each crime that he committed. However, the law of the jungle as applied by irate villagers prevailed,” said the DCI.

A lot of questions remain unanswered on the matter, starting with why the police failed to secure Mr Wanjala properly considering the magnitude of his crimes. Mr Wanjala was sharing a cell at the police station with petty offenders such as those arrested for not wearing masks, being drunk and disorderly, touting and loitering.

Reporting by Vincent Achuka, Brian Ojamaa and Richard Munguti