Recruits arrested for giving fake certificates
Photo/FILE
New police officers mount a parade at Kiganjo Police Training College.
Nine police recruits were on Monday arrested for using fake certificates to get into the police force two months ago.
The seven men and two women were ejected from the Kenya Police Training College in Kiganjo after clearing from the college and will be charged with altering official documents and false pretence to gain employment.
Nyeri police boss Kirunya Limbitu said the college commandant discovered there were anomalies in copies of Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) certificates and sent them to the Kenya National Examination Council in Nairobi for verification.
“The commandant sent 11 copies to the documents and nine were found to have been altered,” he said.
Two of the candidates, who had been successfully enrolled at the police college two months ago had never sat or registered for the KCSE examinations.
One of the suspects presented a fake KCSE certificate from a secondary school, from which he neither registered nor sat for examinations.
Candidate No.32
Another one had an index number indicating that he was candidate number 32 yet the school where he reportedly sat for his KCSE had only 28 registered candidates.
Others had altered grades to suit the minimum requirement for joining the police force.
The suspects were on Monday taken to the Nyeri police station in a police van together with their belongings that included metal boxes, bags and blankets.
They would spend the night at the police cells and appear in court to answer to the charges brought against them.
Screening
During the police recruitment done recently, all candidates were carefully screened and their documents scrutinized to ensure only genuine ones joined the police.
It however appears some candidates managed to use fake documents to join the country’s only police training college and even commence studies on the new police curriculum.
Mr Limbitu said thousands of certificates had been sent to Nairobi for verification adding that more recruits may be found to have cheated.
