A Nairobi Magistrate’s Court on Friday ruled to find Omar Lali criminally liable of the death of his ex-girlfriend, the late Keroche Breweries heiress Tecra Muigai.
In the ruling, the Senior Principal Magistrate Zainab Abdul paved the way for the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) to file murder charges against him.
This new development comes four years since the DPP applied to terminate the murder case proceedings against Lali and requested for an open inquest in the case on July 16, 2020. He was then released and set at liberty.
Lali had first been charged in the murder at the Lamu Law Courts after Muigai's passing on May 2, 2020 following the fatal fall down the stairs of Tecra Muigai that Lali was suspected of perpetrating.
She was found on the floor of the house they were living in together in Shella, Lamu county. Initially, Lali told the investigators that it was an accidental fall down the stairs but later changed his story, saying that she had fallen in the bathroom.
He was arrested and later freed on bond after the DPP reviewed toxicology reports, detailed post mortem reports and phone records. His freedom did not last long as he was rearrested once again on July 13 after an application by state Lawyer Eddie Kadebe before the murder charge was terminated three days later.
Since then, Lali has been walking free, occasionally landing in the news for various controversies including new developments in Muigai’s death investigation.
In March 2021, Lali was summoned in court by Magistrate Abdul after new details emerged that Lali had coerced Muigai to transact Ksh1 million into his account, a detail that had been unearthed by her mother, the now Nakuru senator Tabitha Karanja.
Muigai’s brother James Karanja on his part told the court that he believed Lali had used supernatural powers to lure his sister into a relationship a well as isolate her from her family members.
“Omar tried to keep her away from us as a family. She started being aggressive and shouting without any reason. She changed her lifestyle and became a person we did not know,” Karanja said.
On June 10, 2021, the judge ordered an arrest warrant for three of Omar’s friends who had failed to honour their court summon and were the first to get to the crime scene.
The new ruling by Magistrate Abdul will change the trajectory of the case going forward. Instead of an open inquest, which suggests there is insufficient evidence to determine how Tecra died, Lali could now be charged with murder suggesting that more evidence might have come up.
