 | Police Commissioner Brig Mohamed Ali addresses journalists outside Ongata Rongai police station after he visited the scene where top Ouko murder investigator David Apollo Jakaiti was shot dead on Thursday night. Next to him is Director of CID Mr Joseph Kamau.
Photo/Paul Waweru |
The killing of a senior CID officer has sent shock through the Parliamentary Select Committee investigating the 1990 murder of Foreign Affairs minister Robert Ouko. Mr David Jakaiti was the chief investigator for the Ouko Committee. He was ambushed by three men about 200 metres from his Ongata Rongai house at 8pm on Thursday. Mr Jakaiti held vital clues into how Dr Ouko was kidnapped and subsequently murdered near his rural home in Kisumu.
He was also the custodian of all forensic evidence related to the minister's grisly murder. Select Committee chairman Gor Sunguh said yesterday that Mr Jakaiti was holding crucial new evidence which he was due to present next week. Mr Sunguh described Mr Jakaiti's killing as a shock to the committee. "I believe his death has something to do with the inquiry," he said at Parliament Buildings. The MP said Mr Jakaiti was in possession of photographs which the committee received recently. "They are very sensitive photographs; they are earth-shaking," he said. They were to be produced as evidence at the next sitting. A senior Assistant Commissioner in charge of the Scenes of Crime section at CID headquarters, Mr Jakaiti was the man in charge of forensic evidence collected from all murder and robbery scenes in the country. He also kept a data bank of all criminals and anybody who has ever been charged with a criminal offence in Kenya. Mr Jakaiti's murder further complicates matters at the CID headquarters because his deputy, Mr David Bett, had been retired along with 56 other high-ranking police officers two days ago. Police Commissioner Mohammed Hussein Ali and CID director Joseph Kamau raced to the scene of the killing on Thursday night and returned again yesterday morning. "We are going to get the killers," Brig Ali vowed. Mr Jakaiti was in the company of his nephew Hudson Masake, also a policeman, and a clergyman, Pastor Peter Orapa. They were on foot because the road from Ongata Rongai Town is impassable by car. A police car normally dropped the 52-year-old officer about 300 metres from his home. The driver, who picks him up in the morning, waits for him at the same spot. Mr Jakaiti, Mr Masake and Pastor Orapa stumbled across a three-man gang who were apparently mugging another pedestrian just across the bridge. The thugs seized the man as he passed them. Before the gang could start frisking him, Mr Jakaiti, his nephew and the pastor appeared. They, too, were ordered to lie on the rocky road and warned not to raise the alarm. But Mr Jakaiti defied the orders and grabbed the man who was brandishing a pistol and started wrestling with him. It was when Mr Jakaiti told his nephew to pull out his pistol (Jakaiti's) from his waist that the gunmen fired the fatal bullet. Before Mr Jakaiti slumped to the ground, his nephew, a police constable attached to Nairobi provincial police headquarters, had already whipped out the gun. He shot dead the man who had the gun. The other two escaped. Detectives are investigating whether Mr Jakaiti walked into a trap. The "mugging victim" vanished into the bushes along with the other two gangsters. He had not turned up at Ongata Rongai police station to file a report by yesterday evening. Mr Orapa said he met Mr Jakaiti in the city and he offered him a lift home. "He told the driver to stop at Ongata Rongai Town where he bought a loaf of bread. He did not take more than five minutes," he said. "We continued on with the journey and he told the driver to drop us at the usual place. As we approached the bridge while on foot, we spotted a man walking ahead of us." Mr Orapa said: "A few metres from the bridge, three men seized the man and there was a struggle." Not knowing those were gangsters, Mr Jakaiti quickened his pace to find out what was happening. The officer in charge of the CID at Ongata Rongai police station, Mr Moses Mwangi, said tracker dogs were use to comb the vicinity but there was no trace of the attackers | 
