Retired Colonel Rogers Munene Mbithi has recounted how his team was nearly killed in 1992 after a Kenya Airforce plane mistakenly veered into Somalia.
In a media interview on Sunday, July 13, the former commandant of the Police Airwing noted that the plane, which was scheduled to land in Mandera from Isiolo, lost its direction and ended up in Somalia, a territory occupied by armed militia.
His team, which was in Kenya at the time, was tasked with fetching the plane from the war-torn Eastern Africa country.
They came up with an elaborate plan to swiftly touch down, start the other plane and immediately take off while disrupting the militia.
"When I was in the airforce, one of our helicopters was flying from Isiolo to Mandera and somehow, they did not get their navigation very well. They strayed deep into Somalia. That is when we were given the task to go and pick up that aircraft from Somalia.
"We planned to lift it off at the same time and blow a lot of dust and (the militia) would not know what had happened but something happened and we could not take off," Mbithi noted as per KBC.
When the plane was about to take off, the team noticed that one of the soldiers had not boarded yet and they had to make sure that he got in.
During the delay, the militia programmed themselves and surrounded the soldiers who were then left with no choice but to surrender.
"When we were surrounded, I knew we would not be leaving that place. Some had live grenades and others had their guns ready. We were ordered to shut down, get out of the aircraft and onto our knees," he added.
The Kenya Defence Forces (KDF) soldiers were then bundled into trucks run by the militia groups and dangerously driven around the area for about 30 minutes. They were later dumped into a dark room.
Diplomatic forces, after catching wind of their plight, however, intervened and managed to evacuate all the soldiers that had been captured by the militia.
So timely was the intervention - which came just hours after they were taken hostage - that later that night, a fierce shootout erupted in the area as the Somali Government reclaimed the land.
"If we had spent the night, we (wouldn't be alive) because the town was taken back that night. There was very serious fighting there," he added.
Mbithi joined the airforce in 1978 as a flight cadet and quickly rose through the ranks and participated in several missions including the Baragoi rescue mission in Samburu County before hanging the boots in 2009.
He later joined the Police Airwing as its commandant, a position he served until 2022 when he was redeployed to the National Police Service Headquarters.
