Police kill varsity friends, dump bodies in morgue

Police officers have been accused of knocking down a 22-year old university student with their vehicle and then fatally shooting him five times.

Egerton University student Felix Magomere was fleeing the officers after they shot his friend, Dennis Nyangina Ongwae, on Grogan Road in Nairobi on Friday November 7.

Felix was a second-year biochemistry student at Egerton’s Njoro campus.

Central Police Station boss Paul Wanjama said the two were shot on suspicion of being muggers.

He, however, could not confirm if the two were armed at the time they were shot dead.

The story narrated by the family and witnesses, however, paints a shocking scenario.

Griffins Mckenzie, Felix’s twin, said his brother and two friends had travelled to Nairobi to check on their student loans at the Higher Education Loans Board at Anniversary Towers.

They were hosted at his brother’s house in Mathare North where he, Griffins, runs a video and playstation business.

The other students were Dennis, 21, and Vincent Odhiambo.

Twelve hours after arriving in Nairobi, Dennis and Felix lost their lives under a hail of police officers’ bullets, each shot five times, according to their families.

WEEKS OF ANXIETY

It would take the families two weeks of anxiety and sorrow to establish their fate and find their bodies.

The officers who reportedly shot them did not contact the university or their next of kin, even though they had college identification cards on them.
According to Griffins, his brother and friend left Mathare North at 5pm.

“They went to town to help the other student get a matatu since he was not familiar with the city. Felix left his phone charging but Dennis carried his. At around 10.00pm, when they did not return, I called Dennis but the phone was off,” said Griffins.

He said he called for two days. He then informed the university administration who joined in the search.

“After two weeks we decided to visit hospitals and mortuaries,” he said.

Felix’s father, Mr David Mckenzie, reported the students’ disappearance at different police stations, including Central, Kasarani, Starehe and Kamukunji.

“Then last week, a police officer at one of the stations told me there were reports that a student had been shot at the Globe Cinema Roundabout and so I decided to go to Central to find out if they had information about the incident,” Griffins said.

“An officer there confirmed that such an incident had occurred on Friday (November) 7 but the identities of those shot dead were yet to be known. He told me police had shot two suspected Gor Mahia fans who were mugging people at Grogan,” he said.

CITY MORTUARY

The officer, an inspector, advised him to check the City Mortuary.

On Saturday, Griffins found the bodies of his brother and the friend at the mortuary.

They had been booked in by police after “being shot at the Grogan area”. The bodies were taken to the mortuary by a police vehicle, GKA462G at 1am, six hours after the shooting.

An officer at Central familiar with the case said during the shooting, Dennis, who was later found to have a student ID, was shot in the stomach and when Felix realised he had been shot, he tried to flee but was chased by the police in a car.

Hawkers said the vehicle knocked him down and as he lay on the tarmac, an officer in plain clothes came out and shot him five times.
“Felix’s body was in a bad state. I counted around five bullet wounds. He had wounds in the ribs, stomach and chest while his friend had bullet wounds in the neck, chest and stomach,” Felix’s father, said. A postmortem is expected to be conducted Tuesday.

Yesterday, he was at the Independent Police Oversight Authority offices to ask them to investigate the matter, terming it an “extrajudicial killing”.
He said his son had never been involved in any form of crime.

“If they suspected him, they should have arrested him and investigated his moves rather than shoot him, yet he was unarmed,” he said.