Nairobi — When 15-year-old John Kairia Mwangi went home for mid-term holidays nearly a month ago, little did he know that he would be mistaken for a notorious gangster and end up in hospital with gun shot wounds.

Currently confined in a bed at the Nyeri Provincial General Hospital, partially paralysed, he should be counting himself lucky that he is still alive.

Hardly had he settled down at their Muhuhi Village in Mathira Division on February 26 when a contingent of more than 20 detectives from the Criminal Investigation Department arrived and surrounded their homestead.

The family members were taken by surprise by the armed officers.

Reports from security agents indicate that they had been detailed to pursue armed gangsters who had committed a robbery in Karatina Town.

Somebody had tipped off the police that the suspects were hiding in the village.

An overzealous officer is reported to have aimed his gun at the teenager and started spraying bullets, two of them hitting Mwangi in the leg and arm.

Police now say the student was unfortunate to have been wearing clothes similar to those worn by one of the gangsters on the run.

Speaking from his hospital bed, Kairia, a student at Kiamwangi secondary school recounted how hell broke loose on that fateful Friday at around 5.30pm.

It was a day that the Mwangi's family will live to remember and definitely a traumatising episode that will haunt it for the rest of their lives.

Kairia was going through books with his twin brother Francis Mathenge, who is his schoolmate, when the officers pounced.

They were inside their living room when his father, Mr Stephen Mwangi, called him. He wanted to send to him to a nearby shop.

"Before I went to the shop, I had to bathe first. So I decided to fetch some water outside our house. All of a sudden, I saw a group of men clad in civilian clothes but they were armed with riffles, which they pointed at me," said 17-year-old Kairia.

He added, "I hurriedly rushed back to the house and informed my parents that armed thugs were coming our way."

He decided to seek refuge in a neighbour's house but his sprint was cut shot by a hail of bullets.

"Since I was terrified, I managed to rise up and tried to limp across the barbed wire fence but the armed men kept on firing. It was then that they shot my hand twice and I had no option but to surrender waiting for any eventuality," he said.

After he fell down

Kairia said that he could hear bullets buzzing like bees past him even after he fell down.

"I could hear my father pleading with the police to spare me.

However, when the police officers reached where he was lying, one was heard saying they should finish the job by ensuring he was dead.

Kairia says he will always remain indebted to a woman from his village who he only knows as Mama Chiku, who was cutting nappier grass for her cows at the time of the incident. The commotion drew her where the boy lay bleeding and she held him as she pleaded with the officers over his innocence.

By this time, more than 10 officers had surrounded them pointing their guns at him.

"If you want to kill the boy, then you would have to kill me first. Can't you see this is an innocent secondary school boy who doesn't even know what a gun is," Kairia recalls the woman saying.

Meanwhile, as the scene unfolded, Kairia's father and his brother were under going a different kind of torture by the officers.

Mr Mwangi recounted how some officers grabbed and wrestled him to the ground.

The officers threatened to shoot him as his bewildered sons and his wife pleaded for their lives.

Was barking orders

"As the officers worked on me, one of them, who appeared to have been in charge, was barking orders, shoot, shoot, he is Salim, he is a gangster," the school boy recalled with a shudder.

In a moment, the whole village came to witness what was happening and people expressed their shock at the shooting of the student, sending police into a panic.

The police later rushed the victim to Karatina district hospital after his parents presented documents and an identity card showing that he was a student.

Mathira MP Nderitu Gachagua condemned the incident when he visited the family recently. He assisted them with some money to cater for the medical bill.

But in a strange twist of events, the gangster who led to the erroneous shooting of the student was later shot dead on March 20 in Karatina Town.

But even as he recuperates in his hospital bed, Kairia know that he will live with the wounds as a permanent reminder of how close he came to death.