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Prisons authority rebuts Kelvin Kangethe's incommunicado claims

Murder suspect Kelvin Kangethe in the dock at the Mîlîmanî law courts. Picture (Joseph Ndunda)

By Joseph Ndunda | 01 Mar 2024

Kangethe had on Tuesday this week claimed that prison authorities had denied him the opportunity to make calls to get assistance and were unable to hire different lawyers after sacking his lawyers.

The Kenya Prisons Service has dismissed claims by murder suspect Kelvin Kangethe that he is being held incommunicado at the Nairobi Area Remand and Allocation Prison hence unable to hire a lawyer.

Kangethe had on Tuesday this week claimed that prison authorities had denied him the opportunity to make calls to get assistance and were unable to hire different lawyers after sacking lawyers David Muthama and Anthony Kago who were previously representing him.

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But Superintendent of Prisons Martin Onyango Ojwang who is in charge of documentation at the prison dismissed the suspect’s claims as falsehoods.

Appearing before Milimani Chief Magistrate Lucas Onyina to respond to Kangethe’s claims, Ojwang detailed more than 10 times that Kangethe made calls to the four contacts he had provided.

The officer said when he received Kangethe at the facility on February 14, he asked him for the contacts of people he would be calling and the suspect gave four of them including Muthama, Kago, lawyer Mohamed Ahmed, and one other person.

Ojwang provided the court with call data records obtained from telecommunication services provider Safaricom Limited through the Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI), detailing all the calls the suspect made between February 14 and 27.

But Kangethe said the call logs shared with the court indicated that all the calls he made lasted for less than seconds as most were not picked and therefore he was still unable to communicate.

However, Ojwang told the court that he could not respond to the issue of conversations lasting seconds because the CDR was generated by Safaricom and that Kangethe spoke with the prison officer on Wednesday and made no complaints. He stated that Kangethe's only issue was toiletries.

“I am just shocked by what the respondent (Kangethe) is saying. The Kangethe I have in court is different from the Kangethe I have in prison because every time he wants to make calls, he is always escorted to my office where I give him the phone used by more than 4000 other inmates in the prison to make calls and he normally says thank you sir before leaving my office after making calls,” said Ojwang.

The officer said he placed Kangethe in block K26 at the facility where capital offenders are held and he is constantly under guard of two officers – an inspector of prisons and an officer in the rank of corporal during the day and six officers are constantly watching him every night.

He said there was no time the two mobile phones at the welfare desk that inmates use were unavailable to the suspect.

Kangethe told Onyina that he wanted the officers to avail his phone so that he could get contacts of different people since he had already fired his lawyers and wanted to hire different ones.

The phone is currently detained by the DCI which is conducting investigations into how Kangethe escaped from Muthaiga police station where he was in police custody earlier last month.

Kangethe said he wants lawyer John Ndengwa Maina, the lawyer who visited him at the police station before he fled, to represent him.

Onyina said Kangethe will be assisted in getting contacts he needs to be able to hire lawyers before March 13 when the case will be mentioned.

The suspect is wanted in the US to be prosecuted for the murder of his girlfriend Margaret Mbitu and he is being held pending extradition proceedings.