Suspected Kenyan serial killer escapes from custody

A Kenyan man, who the police claim has confessed to murdering and dismembering 42 women, has escaped from a Nairobi police cell.

This along with a dozen other detainees, the local police said on Tuesday.

Collins Jumaisi (33), described by the police as “a vampire, a psychopath”, was arrested last month after the horrific discovery of mutilated bodies in a garbage dump in a slum in the Kenyan capital.

“They escaped last night, 13 in total, including the key suspect in the dump murder case,” Kenya police spokeswoman Resila Onyango told AFP.

She said the other 12 detainees who had also escaped from the police station were Eritreans.

Jumaisi appeared in a court in Nairobi on Friday, where the magistrate ordered him to be held for a further 30 days to enable the police to complete their investigations.

Ten butchered women’s bodies trussed up in plastic bags were found at the dumpsite in an abandoned quarry in the Nairobi slum of Mukuru, the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights said last month.

Jumaisi was detained in the early hours of 15 July near a bar where he had been watching the Euro 2024 football final.

The head of Kenya’s directorate of criminal investigations, Mohamed Amin, after his arrest said Jumaisi had confessed to murdering 42 women since 2022, and that his wife had been his first victim.

“We are dealing with a vampire, a psychopath,” Amin said at the time.

The dumped bodies threw a fresh spotlight on Kenya’s police, as they were found just 100m from a police station.

The state-funded Kenya National Commission on Human Rights in July said it was carrying out its own investigations into the Mukuru case, because “there is a need to rule out any possibility of extrajudicial killings”.

Kenya’s police watchdog, the Independent Police Oversight Authority, has also said it was looking into whether there was any police involvement or a “failure to act to prevent” the killings.

The Kenyan police are often accused by rights groups of carrying out unlawful killings or running hit squads, but few have faced justice.

– AFP