Nairobi — Gangs in Kenya Have Realised That Every Family, No Matter How Poor, Will Give Everything It Can to Stay Whole, Sparking a Rising Trend of Kidnappings for Ransom. the Crime, and the Public’s Reaction to It, Have Left Police At Something of a Loss, and Kenyans Scrambling to Stay Safe.

You’re alone in your house, in your bed where you fell asleep to the gentle sound of rain on your roof. It’s the middle of the night, and you’ve been sleeping peacefully, feeling safe because it’s your home, where you’ve lived for years. Then you wake up, heart pounding. That was glass breaking, there’s no doubt. Did you dream it? No, there’s more sounds coming from the window, a metallic clang. There’s someone there, and they’re going to get into your house. The glass is broken and now they’re cutting the grill. You want to run, but it’s too late, there’s probably someone at the door. Your heart is beating out of your chest and you can’t catch your breath. Why is this happening to you? You try to calm down, as men come into your room.

You don’t want to give them a reason to hurt you. They’re going to take your belongings, but you want to live through the night. Then they come at you, and you are told that you’re going with them.

It is heart-stopping terror, a worst nightmare come true for victims and their families, and it was exactly what Mary Wanjiku Kuria went through in late October 2012. The 64-year-old granny was sure it was a robbery; thugs had recently taken to breaking into homes in her neighbourhood, Kongo-ini village, in Murang’a County. But instead of taking her things they tied her hands and bundled her into a waiting vehicle. Under the stealth of a power blackout and a thunderstorm, they also tied up the house help and left her behind before speeding off with the elderly woman. Unspeakably frightened and not knowing what would happen to her next, she prayed that it would be over soon. What followed was a 10-day ordeal that also left her family agonising as the abductors demanded KSH 1 million in ransom. Welcome to the world of kidnapping, a newly popular form of crime that has left police baffled, families desperate and Kenyans feeling insecure.

*MODUS OPERANDI *

Kidnapping in Kenya, while a serious threat since 2009, came into its own in the last months of 2012. Previously, people were carjacked and forced to get money for their captors. Now, people are taken and held while their families and friends scramble to raise astronomical ransoms. Since 2009 police statistics show a disturbing increase in the number of kidnappings taking place in and around Kenya.

There were 95 cases of kidnapping in 2009, when the crime emerged as an ‘easy’ way to make money for Nairobi gangs. The cases reduced to 65 in 2010, but since then have been increasing, culminating in 74 in 2012. The figures look as though they’ll continue their upward trend, and these are only the cases reported to police. While approximately 30 suspected kidnappers have been killed each year since 2009 and police say they are currently prosecuting 20 kidnap cases in various courts in the country, kidnappers aren’t deterred. In fact, they are only getting better at what they do. When it comes to choosing a target, Kenyan kidnappers both plan their victims in advance and pick them at random.

While some people are researched online and stalked to find the opportune moment for their abduction, others are simply judged to be a good target, as was the case with Edward Macharia Maina who was kidnapped in early November 2012. Unwinding in a bar in Murang’a, Maina and the other patrons were shocked as gangsters burst in, angry and aggressive. Instead of robbing them, the criminals searched out which of the clientele looked most likely to bring in a good ransom and Maina was the unlucky choice.

To get in touch with their victims’ families, the abductors mostly communicate using a series of mobile phones, making it hard for police to track them. To make things even more difficult, in some cases they use landline phones, meaning that police are unable to track them via their communications. Typically, their first request for money is outlandish. The highest demanded ransom so far was KSH 70 million, but the family ended up paying only KSH 4 million. The request from Mary Wanjiku Kuria’s abductors, KSH 1 million, sent her family into a panic - there was no way they could get that much money together. Through mobile phone conversations, the abductors lowered it to KSH 500,000, then again to KSH 250,000. Meanwhile, Kuria was being held in a strange place, locked inside a small cubicle.

“I survived on half cooked rice and water but I thank God I am alive today,” she says, adding that she was forced to call one of her daughters and inform her what had happened.

The family could not afford even the drastically reduced ransom and were forced to fund raise through the help of neighbours, managing only KSH 120,000.

“The abductors took the money and released my mother but said we should clear the remaining KSH 130,000 or they [would] come take her again,” said one of Kuria’s daughters, Beatrice Njeri.

They opted to pay the balance.The old woman was released at about 7pm after being held for 10 days and dumped in Kenol town, near the Nyeri-Nairobi highway and about 20km from her home. Luckily she was not injured, but the trauma was so great that she moved from her Kongo-ini home and now lives with one of her sons in nearby Maragua town. What is so shocking about this rash of crimes is that its masterminds have made inroads into rural areas, rather than focusing on urban areas with traditionally wealthier residents.

Lured by the prospects of quick money from desperate people, abductors have found a gold mine.

In a country where trust in the police force only goes so far, Kenyans whose loved ones have been abducted, even if they turn to law enforcement, are eager to raise and pay off the ransoms to be sure that the victim is returned safely. The ugly crime has not spared children who have also become prized targets for kidnappers, with parents left to agonise over them, not knowing what their fate will be. Another common target is the elderly, treasured in most Kenyan cultures. Of course, husbands and wives are not immune.

*NAIROBBERY BECOMES NAI-RANSOM-RY *

In October 2009, then Nyamira Senator Kennedy Okongo Mong’are was shocked when his car was blocked and he was ordered out of it by three gunmen near the Intercontinental Hotel. He cooperated, assuming it was a normal robbery, but things changed when they abandoned his Toyota Harrier on the streets.

“One of them hit me with a gun butt on my eye and disabled me. The next thing I remember was finding myself in an isolated room somewhere [that] I think was Dandora or Eastlands.”

In the room, he realised that there were roughly three other kidnapped victims bound and starving - all they were being fed was milk and bread.

The gang that had taken him hostage was part of a larger one that had been behind several other incidents. When they arrived at the holding room, they demanded that Mong’are organise how his family would pay the KSH 1 million ransom they were demanding.

“I told them what I do for a living and we started to develop a good rapport. Slowly they agreed to allow me to make calls to specific people who sent money to my mobile phone,” said the senator.

Mong’are managed to raise part of the demanded ransom and paid the gang, who released him after two days of captivity.

“The gang was heavily armed and one of them [would] dismantle and mount an AK47 rifle [every so often] to demonstrate their ability. All they wanted was quick money.”

After his release, the kidnappers took his contacts and - having found out that he was a lawyer before a politician - even went so far as to tell him that they would call him to represent them in court in case they were caught. He went straight to the police station to report what had happened.

In his first piece of luck since the saga began, the police had impounded his car, so it was at the station waiting for him. Using his information, the police started to track the kidnappers.

Mong’are told them about the other victims he’d seen, including a caucasian man who seemed unwell. Though some of the kidnappers were almost friendly at times, smoking bhang in the rooms where the victims were being held in isolation and chatting with them on various topical issues, the leader was a harder man.

“The commander of the gang was very strict and was against any contact between us and the gang members,” he explained, “What I went through was something I would not want anyone to experience.”

It took police almost a month to trace the gang and dismantle the cartel - dismantle here meaning killing them along Thika Road as they staked out their next victim. By then, cases of kidnapping were on the rise and police were getting overwhelmed as victims’ relatives would walk into police stations daily to report the same. Perhaps the most shocking thing about these recent crimes is that the gangs are sometimes organised from inside Kenya’s prisons. While some of Kenya’s most notorious lock-ups are known sites of mobile phone money transfer frauds, this is a newer phenomenon - though it does have some logic.

There are a limited amount of crimes that can be committed with phones, and kidnapping for ransom is one of them so long as the organiser can find henchmen on the outside. Compound that with the fact that they’re already serving long sentences and that their phones are just one piece of hidden contraband in a cellblock full of forbidden items, and prisons become an ideal place to run an abduction racket from.

All logic aside, however, imagine the shock of South C parents upon finding out that the man responsible for taking their 6-year- old daughter away and threatening to kill her if he did not receive KSH 5 million was actually a man who was already convicted and in prison. Even the joy of getting your child back couldn’t completely dampen your anger at the fact that she’d been taken away by a man who is purposefully set aside from society in order to ensure that he cannot commit such crimes. Such was the case when police tracked gang leader Raphael Nderitu Maina to his cell in Kamiti Maximum Security Prison.

In September 2012, he had his gang stake out a young girl, abducting her from Sunday School at Mavuno Church in South C, before immediately demanding a massive ransom from her parents. Under his leadership, the gang had a sophisticated operation wherein those demanding the money, those collecting the money and those holding the girl worked separately, with Maina coordinating it all. She was held for eight days in a two-bedroom house in Nairobi’s Kariobangi North area when police finally caught up with Maina and his gang. She was returned safely to her family, and those involved in the crime were charged, including Maina and five women. For her and her family, the nightmare was over. They were one choice among many options, and are not likely to experience the horror again. However in smaller towns it can be a recurring nightmare, with gangs targeting specific families and driving them into hysteria and poverty.

*TERROR IN THE COUNTIES *

“The gang burst into my shop at Ndikwe Shopping Centre at around 7pm on Tuesday and dragged me to a waiting vehicle before speeding off towards Murang’a town,” Njoki Irungu recalls. “The gang could have [been targeting] my husband, who was also at the shop, but he managed to escape through the back door. The thugs caught up with me and dared me to escape,” she says.

“I had not seen them as they approached the shop but immediately [when] I heard people shout ‘Thieves, thieves,’ I rushed to close the shop. But the six armed men were too swift.”

Her mother-in-law, Veronica Wamaitha, said the family lived in fear when she was kidnapped.

“We were so scared when she was abducted and we asked the police to apprehend the gang which is so bold,” said Wamaitha.

It seems that in the case of the Ndikwe family, the abductors knew their target well.

“The gang has targeted the homestead four times, during one such attack they shot one of my sons [in] the head, but he survived,” Wamaitha expounds.

She added that one of her sons has been forced to move away from the village due to the constant attacks both at the homestead and at the Ndikwe Shopping Centre. When Irungu was abducted, the kidnappers blindfolded her before ordering her to lie down inside the vehicle as they bumped and sped along the road to a strange place. The thugs did not harm her in any way but she was threatened several times even as the gangsters, who seemed to know her, asked for the ransom. She was not given any food while she was in her abductors’ custody, for more than 48 hours.

For her, relief came quickly on Thursday evening when the gang asked her whether she wanted to go home. A strange question for a person who has been forcibly taken.

Irungu says, “I told them since my life was in their hands, they were free to do what they wished.”

She was dumped at Kenol town and managed to call her husband, who picked her up.

“They released me with a caution not to report the matter to the police or [I would] risk being abducted again together with my children.”

This intensive targeting and pressure on entire families has led many to leave police out of their cases. In fact, Irungu’s family turned to a traditional medicine woman from the Ukambani region, 100km away, rather than trust their local officers. Though relatives were scanty with information, they claimed that the witchdoctor’s charm helped in making the kidnappers release the businesswoman safely.

For two days, Anna Mutheu, 39, reportedly worked behind the scenes using her medicinal charms to bring Irungu back. However, the more likely factor in her release was the payment by the family of a portion of the KSH 500,000 ransom that the thugs had demanded. They declined to reveal exactly how much. Upon her release, Murang’a County Commissioner Kula Hache complained that the victim’s family was unwilling to give information to the police on issues surrounding the abduction and consequent release.

This, according to Hache and other police sources, has been one of the contributing factors to their hardship in limiting these crimes.

*WHAT ARE POLICE DOING? *

Director of Criminal Investigation Division (CID) Ndegwa Muhoro says kidnapping is a new phenomenon to them but that the crime is being given an increased focus.

“It is a challenging crime that our officers are now getting familiarised with. We hope to address it with the help of the public at large,” he said.

He went on to say that they have rescued several abduction victims, killed suspects and arrested dozens others in the past years, as he commended officers who were involved in the operations.

Muhoro expressed a sense of control, indicating that the police have already dismantled a number of dangerous cartels. But it appears, with the rapid rise in kidnappings, that new ones are forming and learning from the mistakes of their colleagues. Kenya is not the only country dealing with this crime. In fact, an international perspective makes the issue here seem insignificant. In Venezuela, kidnapping for ransom matches the trends in Kenya - for instance both the poor and wealthy are attacked - but on a much larger scale.

In a population with roughly 29 million people, compared to Kenya’s 41 million, they suffered 16,917 kidnappings between July 2008 and July 2009.

This crime, in combination with extremely high murder rates, made internal violence a thorn in the late Hugo Chavez’s side. Making matters worse, he proved that for high profile cases the police force was able to track down victims when Wilson Ramos, a Venezuelan baseball player in the American major league, was kidnapped in 2011. With the full weight of law enforcement bearing down on the kidnappers, it took all of two days to track down his kidnappers and a SWAT- style mission to rescue him alive.

Venezuela is joined in the five worst countries for kidnapping by Mexico, India, Pakistan and Nigeria - all countries known to have limited or corrupt police forces. It would seem that the key to preventing abductions within a country is a strong police force with established procedures for the crime. In America, for instance, as soon as police believe a child has been kidnapped they issue an AMBER Alert, which sends out a description of the child and, when known, the kidnapper, including details like car model and registration.

The alert is passed along through Emergency Broadcasting Systems, media and, recently, to citizens via SMS messages if they have subscribed to the programme. While security measures don’t always translate across borders, it is clear that this crime needs dedicated attention from Kenyan police, lest we end up with a situation like Venezuela’s. To that end, they have been developing new measures, the success of which is yet to be seen.

“We currently have special squads that deal with such a menace and I am sure we are in charge of the affairs. We assure Kenyans that such gangs will be pursued to the end,” Muhoro said.

Backing up his claims, CID headquarters say few cases remain unresolved among those that have been reported to the police so far. Police in Murang’a have also enjoyed a relatively strong success rate, with many of the victims rescued and some of the abductors arrested, though a number are still at large and continue to terrorise families with abandon.

Not all victims have been fortunate enough to come out of the ordeal safely, some have been found dead and others disappeared without a trace.

According to Hache, tracking the kidnappers has been difficult as the local community is unwilling to offer information. “The kidnappers live amongst residents but the locals have refused to give us information about them,” she laments.

*SUSPICIOUS LINKS*

This difficulty becomes much easier to understand when one considers the sheer amount of groups associated with these crimes. In addition to small gangs formed specifically to abduct, the kidnappings have been linked to the dreaded Mungiki sect as some of the arrested kidnappers are said to be members of the gang. Two of those arrests were made when Joseph Muru was rescued in December 2012.

Early in the morning of his eleventh day in captivity, over 100 police officers stormed the compound where Muru was being held. When I arrived at the crime scene, two of the kidnappers were being held by police just outside the large, corrugated iron house where they’d kept Muru. One of them, who had apparently withdrawn some of the paid ransom, looked shut off, keeping his cool. The other was shell-shocked and scared, and kept pleading his innocence. So how did he come to be holding an abducted man prisoner? The kidnapper explained that he was forced into the illegal trade because he was in debt to a Mungiki member. His own safety was on the line if he did not collaborate.

“He demanded [the] KSH 10,000 I owed him but said he could write off the debt if I was ready to keep the kidnapped businessman in my house. I obliged,” he said.

Later arraigned in court, he was released on a KSH 500,000 bond - a hefty sum for a man who couldn’t pay off a loan amounting to only 20 percent of the bond. Further muddying the waters is the matter of convict involvement in these crimes.

The fact that criminals are able to plan and execute abductions while still behind bars raises more than a few questions. How are they able to get mobile phones and maintain criminal organisations from prison? Guards do contraband checks, so are these prisoners bribing officials with ransom money? Residents aren’t satisfied, and hundreds of them took to the streets in January this year in protest, accusing the area police of playing a part in the kidnappings. They demanded that senior police officers be moved for failing to curb crime in the area. Hache defended her officers over the allegations but promised that tough action would be taken against rogue police that are suspected of helping gangs.

“I want to assure the residents that our officers are innocent and that allegations that they are playing part in the on-going kidnapping incidents are false,” she said, but added that they are investigating some police officers who are suspected to be part of a racket behind the kidnapping of six people in the area.

“I want to say that the security agents are working around the clock to ensure that security is tightened in the area and all the mentioned officers will be investigated and action taken against them if found guilty,” she said.

*AN END IN SIGHT?*

In the meantime, police are urging caution and cooperation. They advise parents to be especially watchful of their children and adults to be mindful of their personal and home security. To the communities, police ask that everyone watch what goes on in their neighbourhoods, because victims have to be held somewhere and suspicious behaviour should be noted.

“Let us try to know who your neighbour is and what is going on there. That can help. If you spot something unusual, report it and you can help a [great] deal. At times these criminals hide their victims in places known to residents,” said Muhoro.

Some of the biggest issues in fighting this crime, however, are that it is typically rewarding to the perpetrators and families often don’t cooperate with police. When threatened and warned against getting law enforcement involved, they choose to trust the honour system of ransom rather than the police. This can have tragic results, as was the case with Emanuel Nderu, who was kidnapped in Kasarani in September 2012. His family complied with the abductors in every way, not working with police and paying a significant ransom, but he was still murdered. Hache has publicly said that families should not pay ransoms, as this only exasperates the problem.

If a gang is seen making a fortune by threatening people’s lives, what’s to stop other desperate people from joining in? And obviously working with the police is the only way that victims’ families have a chance of catching these criminals, but threats during and after the kidnappings have proved strong deterrents. In Kenya, as in the world over, police are lauded when they do a good job and criticised where they fail, but one massive thing that sets this country apart is a self-reliance for protection, as seen by the booming private security industry. The question becomes, will there ever be a point where Kenyans trust their law enforcement enough to save their families, when money is likely to do the job for sure? If not, kidnapping is likely to remain an ever-present threat.