Three Kenya Forest Service officers will on Monday be charged with murder just days after they were arrested for assaulting a boda boda operator in Eldama Ravine.
The officers, drawn from the Narasha Forest, are facing murder charges after 26-year-old Augustine Kipkoech succumbed to injuries he reportedly sustained during the assault.
On Wednesday last week, the three officers were taken in after attacking the boda boda rider who had been sent to fetch fencing posts by a client in the forest.
The family recalled hearing gunshots from the forest and running to see what had transpired.
Officers outside the Kenya Forest Service (KFS) gate when it was opened in 2011
KFS
“He had been called to the forest to help the others as a boda rider. A while later I was called and informed that my son had been arrested. When I got there I found my son had been beaten to death,” Kipkoech’s father narrated.
His distraught mother relayed that she had been stopped from seeing her son by the officers who blocked her from accessing the premises by trailing a gun at her.
“When I arrived there, the officers stopped me. I told them I just wanted to see my son but they told me they did not want me there. But I forced my way in as he prevented me from entering,” she stated.
“My husband was a caring person. I am now left with little children. What will I do now? I am still young. I am only 21 years old. We were a very young household. What will I do now?” Kipkoech’s widow lamented.
It turned out that the victim had been shot in the leg and was bleeding profusely, which led the officers to take him to the hospital for treatment.
At the Eldama Ravine Sub-County Hospital, medics transferred him to the Nakuru Referral Hospital as they realised they could not treat him. It was at the Nakuru facility that he succumbed to his injuries a day later.
As for the KFS, they have condemned the incident, stating that the assault and eventual murder were unwarranted, and called for the prosecution of the three.
“That is a very unfortunate incident. We do not condone that kind of relationship between our rangers and the members of the public,” one official said.
“The officers from KFS should never and must never take the law into their hands by attacking, by shooting them, by killing innocent people because the law presumes in Article 50 that everybody is innocent until proven guilty by a competent court of law,” another added.
Rangers from the Kenya Forest Service (KFS) during a past operation
Photo
KFS