{"id":22868,"date":"2022-07-22T21:02:23","date_gmt":"2022-07-23T01:02:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/?p=22868"},"modified":"2022-07-22T21:02:23","modified_gmt":"2022-07-23T01:02:23","slug":"willie-kimani-kenyan-policemen-guilty-of-murdering-human-rights-lawyer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/2022\/07\/22\/willie-kimani-kenyan-policemen-guilty-of-murdering-human-rights-lawyer\/","title":{"rendered":"Willie Kimani: Kenyan policemen guilty of murdering human rights lawyer"},"content":{"rendered":"
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A Kenyan court has found three policemen and a civilian guilty of the murder of a human rights lawyer and two other people in June 2016.<\/b><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The bodies of Willie Kimani, his client and a taxi driver were found after they had been dumped in a river on the outskirts of the capital, Nairobi.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The case caused national outrage and highlighted the many extrajudicial killings and disappearances that have been blamed on the Kenyan police.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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A fourth policeman was acquitted.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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“I am satisfied that there was no other reasonable hypothesis that can be made on the basis of the evidence before me except that of guilt,” Judge Jessie Lessit ruled.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Kimani was defending motorbike taxi driver Josephat Mwenda who had accused policeman Fredrick Leliman – one of the three officers found guilty – of shooting him for no reason at a traffic stop in 2015.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Kimani, Mwenda and their taxi driver Joseph Muiruri were last seen on 23 June 2016 at a police station.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Their mutilated bodies were recovered two weeks later in a river almost 100km (62 miles) from the city.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Outside court, Kimani’s widow Hanna said the verdict had brought justice and was “a source of comfort to our hearts, even though it may not bring Kimani back”.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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“At least Kimani will not be included in the statistics of people who went through torture, went to abduction, tortured and killed without getting justice,” she said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Benson Shamala, the Kenya director of International Justice Mission, where Kimani worked said: “No-one should go through what our friends… went through and especially from the very people mandated to protect them.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Kenya’s Independent Policing Oversight Authority (IPOA) has recorded more than 6,000 complaints, according to data the agency has gathered since its creation 10 years ago, but few officers have been prosecuted.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Mr Shamala said that Friday’s judgement showed that Kenya’s justice system was capable of “delivering justice in cases of police abuse of power”.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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“This landmark decision will send a strong message to rogue police officers who abuse their powers that they will be held accountable under the law,” he said in a statement.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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IJM commended the prosecutors adding that since the 2016 killings, more than 40 police officers had been convicted of murder or manslaughter.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Sentencing for the three officers and the civilian, who was as a police informant, will be announced at a later date.<\/p>\n

Source: bbc.co.uk<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Kenyan court has found three policemen and a civilian guilty of the murder of a human rights lawyer and two other people in June 2016. The bodies of Willie Kimani, his client and a […]<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":22869,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[15,2,6],"tags":[138,1160,8131],"class_list":{"0":"post-22868","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-human-rights","8":"category-news","9":"category-world","10":"tag-human-rights","11":"tag-kenya","12":"tag-nairobi","13":"pmpro-has-access"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22868","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22868"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22868\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22871,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22868\/revisions\/22871"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22869"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22868"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22868"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22868"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}