NAIROBI, Kenya — The day started like any other for Willie Kimani, a Nairobi lawyer. He put on his gray trousers, jungle-green jacket and black shoes. He said goodbye to his wife and two young sons. And he walked out the door.
But what came next was like something out of a thriller movie — one with an unsettling end — and has mobilized Kenya’s lawyers, roped in several Western embassies and set off loud alarm bells in Kenya’s human rights community.
Last Thursday, Mr. Kimani, who has worked as a human rights defender since he graduated from law school five years ago, accompanied a client to trial in a case involving a police officer.
After a couple of witnesses testified, the case was adjourned a little before noon. Mr. Kimani and his client left the courthouse, on the outskirts of Nairobi, in a taxi.
Then they disappeared.
Mr. Kimani, an investigator with an American legal aid group, had been working on the case of a young motorcycle taxi driver who had been shot in the arm, apparently accidentally, by a police officer last year.
The driver, Josephat Mwenda, filed a complaint against the officer, who has not been publicly identified. The officer and his colleagues retaliated by pursuing false charges against Mr. Mwenda, including drug counts and accusations of petty crimes like riding a motorcycle without a helmet, according to human rights activists.
Still, Mr. Mwenda was reluctant to drop his complaint, and human rights advocates urged him to resist what appeared to be a pattern of police intimidation and harassment.
Around 4:30 p.m. Thursday, after the men had left the courtroom and no one had been able to reach them, Mr. Mwenda’s wife received a strange phone call, colleagues say.
A passer-by happened to see two men, maybe more, locked in a metal container on a police base yelling through a barred window for help.
The men threw out a note scribbled on toilet paper. The note was from Mr. Mwenda. It said: Call my wife. I’m in danger.
That is the last anyone has seen or heard from Mr. Kimani, Mr. Mwenda or the taxi driver, human rights advocates say. Their phones abruptly went dead on Thursday night. Police officers at the base where the toilet paper note was reportedly thrown out the window denied ever seeing the three.
Early the next morning, the taxi was found more than 30 miles away, parked on a road in a deserted, misty tea plantation, with the doors locked.
Many of Mr. Kimani’s colleagues now fear that police officers may have killed the three. And while Kenya is widely known as corrupt and violent, and is dogged by a long history of impunity, the brazen disappearing of a witness, a taxi driver and a well-known human rights defender is considered far beyond the norm in this country.
“That could have been me,” said Jeremy Chabari, a young Kenyan lawyer.
Kenya is no Rwanda, Ethiopia or Democratic Republic of Congo, places where dissidents are routinely locked up or worse. Kenya is considered one of the most progressive and open democracies in Africa. But this case is seen as a chilling setback in the battle to clean up the Kenyan police services.
“It’s astonishing that a lawyer with international human rights connections can be ‘disappeared’ in a country which enjoys strong international support and is subject to close Western scrutiny,” said Salim Lone, a former official in Kenya’s leading opposition party who now lives in New Jersey.
On Wednesday, several dozen young lawyers, immaculately dressed in suits and equipped with the latest smartphones, stood on the steps of Kenya’s Supreme Court to deliver a set of demands. The lawyers called on the government to immediately open an independent investigation and make a full report public by next week.
Charles Kanjama, the chairman of the lawyers’ group, said that the case had caused “great, great concern to the entire legal fraternity” and that the circumstances were “very suspicious.”
Kenyan police officials have said little, except that the investigation is being handled by an elite unit known as the Flying Squad, which is widely suspected of engaging in extrajudicial killings in the past.
The Flying Squad has been checking phone records and looking at footage from roadside surveillance cameras to identify where the three might have been taken. Human rights activists predicted that several officers, including the one involved in the original shooting, would soon be arrested.
The International Justice Mission, the American legal aid group that employed Mr. Kimani and has been representing Mr. Mwenda in his court cases, is a well-connected Christian organization. Within hours of the three men vanishing, the American Embassy in Nairobi received several messages from Washington asking diplomats to look into the case.
“We are heartbroken by this horrific targeting of our staff and are doing everything we can to locate these men,” said Claire Wilkinson, the group’s director in Kenya.
Read more: Kenyan Filed a Complaint Against the Police, Then He and His Lawyer Disappeared
Source: NYTIMES
