Mukuru killings: Autopsies postponed to Wednesday over expected anti-govt protests

The series of postmortems that began Monday on bodies collected at the Kware dumpsite in Mukuru will take a break today and resume on Wednesday following the expected anti-government protests in Nairobi.

By Monday police had accounted for nine bodies collected at the site since last Friday.

Locals, however, said they collected one more body on Monday afternoon and escorted it to the city mortuary where the exercise is ongoing.

The exercise will help establish the method of killing the victims before they were dismembered, thrown into sacks and dumped into the garbage site where they were found.

The exercise is likely to take a while owing to its delicate nature, as some body parts were recovered in a decomposed state and will thus need to be taken through DNA analysis to establish their identities.

Meanwhile, the police are expected to arraign the main suspect in the killings in court under a miscellaneous application.

They will be seeking to detain him longer to allow them to complete the probe before he is charged with the murders.

The 33-year-old suspect was arrested at a club in the Soweto slums in Kware where police said he had gone to watch the Euro football finals early Monday morning.

Volunteers carry a body of an unknown person retrieved, with seven others, from a dumpsite in Mukuru slums, in Nairobi, Kenya, July 12, 2024. (Photo: REUTERS/Monicah Mwangi/File Photo)

The police said the suspect confessed to having killed 42 individuals, mainly women who he killed and dismembered before dumping their bodies at the site between 2022 and July 11, 2024.

Heightened tensions

The discovery of the bodies, all women has heightened tensions in the country as it coincides with the recent claims of extra judicial killings of anti-government protests.

DCI Director Amin Mohamed assured Kenyans that, a thorough probe is ongoing to unravel the mystery behind the killings.

The suspect's wife was his first casualty according to the police.

She was allegedly killed and her body dismembered after mismanaging a business venture he had set up for her on several occasions, which triggered his anger and deadly attack.

A second suspect who was arrested with a mobile phone belonging to one of Jumaisi's victims is being processed by detectives, after which he shall be treated either as a suspect or witness in the case.

This is because, according to the DCI, he may have bought the phone innocently from the prime suspect who would sell off his victims' phones at throw-away prices after killing them.