A court has ruled that there is sufficient evidence to bring murder charges against three GSU officers accused of fatally shooting four protesters on the Nairobi-Mombasa Highway in June 2022.
In a ruling delivered on November 12, the court found that ballistic and post-mortem evidence showed that the four protesters had died from gunshot wounds.
Duncan Kanari, Letemir Topoika, Dennis Matheka and Ntidu Tereu were gunned down while protesting at the Masimba Trading Centre.
Six more people were injured during demonstrations held against the increasing cases of human–wildlife conflict in the area.
In addition to the murder charges, the GSU officers face other charges, including excessive use of firearms, conspiracy to defeat justice, conspiracy to commit murder, conspiracy to commit a felony and an accessory after the fact.
The Court has thus recommended that the file be forwarded to the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions (ODPP) for the charges to be employed.
The matter had been led by the Independent Policing Oversight Authority (IPOA) who took up the matter on own motion pursuant to the provisions of Section 6 of IPOA Act.
Initially, nine police officers had been taken into custody following the deadly shootings.
In November the same year, they filed a case against the Directorate of Public Prosecution (DPP) and IPOA at the Milimani Law Courts claiming that they had falsely been arrested.
According to court documents, the officers claimed that were held up in traffic at Masimba when commotion ensued, and several officers and residents were injured. They thus claimed that that they only fired in the air to scare the irate locals who had barricaded the road with stones.
On November 4, they were summoned to the IPOA headquarters and subsequently, their fingerprints were taken. However, they claimed that they were not informed of the reason for the procedure.
They were then placed in the cells at the Kibra Police station at midday, something they protested in court documents reading, "We were initially arrested without reasons being made known to us."
However, their demand that they had been outnumbered by the mob and therefore the ODPP needed not charge them backfired, as three of them are now facing murder charges.
