NAIROBI (Reuters) – More than a dozen Kenyan security officials pleaded not guilty on Thursday to the 2022 murders of two Indians and a Kenyan, a high-profile case that was among several incidents that triggered the disbandment of a notorious police unit.
The 13 police officers, a National Intelligence Service (NIS) officer and a Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) warden were charged with killing Indian nationals Zulfiqar Ahmad Khan and Mohammed Zaid Sami Kidwai, and a Kenyan national, Nicodemus Mwania Mwange, the prosecutor’s office wrote on X.
“On the night of 22nd July and 23rd July 2022, near Ole Sereni Hotel along Mombasa Road within Nairobi county… the accused abducted and killed the three aforementioned persons,” the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions (ODPP) said.
The defendants’ lawyer Dunstan Omari told Reuters that all of them pleaded not guilty.
Khan and Kidwai were in Kenya as part of President William Ruto’s digital election campaign team in the run-up to the August 2022 presidential vote, and were using Mwange as their driver, local media reported.
The police officers were all serving in the Special Service Unit at the time, the prosecutor’s office said. Ruto disbanded the SSU in September 2022 following his election win, accusing it of extrajudicial killings.
Amnesty International’s Kenya chapter have linked the SSU to most of more than 500 extrajudicial killings and dozens of enforced disappearances between 2019 and September 2022.
Since then, activists and rights groups say that unexplained abductions and illegal detentions by police have continued, including the alleged kidnapping of a son of a cabinet minister.
(Reporting by Humphrey Malalo; Writing by Hereward Holland; Editing by Ammu Kannampilly, William Maclean)
