Three of the four murder suspects who were accused of killing four elderly women at Kisii on suspicion of being witches. They were sentenced to 40 years in jail while a boy who was a teenager during the act was given a lighter sentence of 15 years in prison. [Stanley Ongwae.]
A father and his teenage son played a central role in the murder of four elderly women accused of being witches at Marani in Kisii, two years ago.
A Kisii Court found out that the two, who are among four convicts were guilty of murdering the elderly women.
Consequently, the father, Evans Ogeto Okari(11th accused) and two other men who were accused of being part of the lynch mob have been sentenced to a 40-year jail term.
Amos Nyakundi (first accused), Hesborn Gichana(7th accused) and Okari were each handed 40 years behind the bar while the teenager who was aged 17 during the act was handed a lighter sentence of 15 years.
The court was lenient as it considered his age at the time of committing the offence.
Kisii High Court Judge Kiarie Wa Kiarie, while delivering the judgment said the boy, Chrispine Makworo and the dad (Ogeto Okari) formed the center of the crime after it was established that the crime happened in their compound where the young man was the cause for the witch-hunt mission.
12 other suspects who had been accused alongside the convicts were acquitted after the Court found that witness accounts of the 11 people the Prosecution lined up to testify in the murder case were not consistent establishing their culpability in the matter.
The Court had been told during the trial of the suspects that the accused persons had gathered at the home of Evans Ogeto after a whistle was blown, inviting villagers to convene at his home over an incident that involved witchcraft activities that were meted on Makworo.
The Court heard that witches had taken Makworo captive the night before the incident and rendered him mute after walking with him the entire night.
Makworo’s father said he woke up to a shocking site of strange paraphernalia outside his house before he discovered that his son was also mute, something that called for urgent action.
“I woke up to find a cross and what looked like a grave outside my house. A Tee-shirt of my son (second accused) was placed on the cross and he was there, unable to talk.
The father told the court that villagers who had gathered in his compound murdered the four women but he was not involved in the act.
The son, Makworo, while defending himself said he was too sick the entire day when the incident happened and that he could not comprehend what was happening.
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This was in contradiction with an account given by one of the key witnesses who said Makworo was the first person to hit the first woman who was lynched after a rite to identify the witches started.
An agreement had been made that all villagers shake hands with the mute boy and whoever he would identify was the witch.
“When Jemimah Nyangate was told to greet Makworo and she was about to do so, the boy stood and kicked her. She fell,” the protected witness recounted.
That was when one of the accused persons took a machete and started cutting her wantonly. Many people joined in battering her, alleging she was a witch. One of them brought an old tyre and asked for some fuel.
He got the matchbox and set the woman ablaze after tying her to the old tyre.
In one of the trial sessions during hearing of the matter, sons to the victims gave horrifying accounts of how their mothers were arrested by villagers, frog matched and lynched in broad daylight as they also survived with injuries.
Peter Monari and Tom Onkware, sons to Sigara who at the time of the murder was 93, recounted the horrible happenings that preceded the painful lynching of their aged mother.
Monari told the Court that the lynch mob had found him picking coffee in his mother’s farm and inquired where the house of the elderly woman was and that they wanted to ask her something which they didn’t disclose.
The second brother was badly injured after he brought his motorcycle, wanting to drive the helpless woman to the police. He instead was met with blows and was also hit with a hand hoe by one of the perpetrators before they whisked the mother away.
Sindege Mayaka’s son at one point moved the court into tears after he narrated how he was maimed by the assailants he said he knew very well.
All that while as the lynch mob manhandled his mother in her compound before they frog-matched her and doused her with some paraffin they had found in her house.
“All 11 youths who came for my mother entered her house, one of them came out with a bottle containing paraffin while others removed items from the house. When I asked them why they were doing so, three of them came to me and held my hands with one of them cutting my head with a panga,” he narrated.
The Court, while underpinning the gravity of the matter on trial noted that the case was so sensitive that some other witnesses had to testify in court using pseudonyms to avoid any future dangers as a result of their testimonies.
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