Former USIU-Africa student sentenced to death over colleague’s murder

A High Court judge has sentenced Duncan Livingstone Kimathi, 37, to death for the murder of Sarah Akello Aruwa, a fellow student at the United States International University Africa (USIU-Africa), who was abducted and killed in a ransom plot in 2012.

Justice Kanyi Kimondo delivered the sentence on Thursday after convicting Kimathi under Section 203 as read with Section 204 of the Penal Code. The court found that Akello was killed between June 30 and July 1, 2012, in the Kiamako area of Githunguri, Kiambu County.

Akello was a final-year International Relations student. Before she disappeared, she told a friend she was going to meet a man she had earlier come across at the university library. The court heard that she never returned.

Her family soon received calls from a man using her mobile phone. Her mother, Hellen Atieno Aruwa, told the court the caller demanded Ksh 100,000 for her daughter’s release. She bargained the figure down to Ksh 70,000 and then reported the matter at Kasarani Police Station. Akello’s boyfriend gave similar evidence. When he phoned her number, a man picked up and told him to send Ksh 100,000 to her mobile money account.

A notebook entry also featured in the trial. In it, Akello had recorded that she planned to meet a person named Daniel Muriithi, along with his phone number. Kimathi, however, did not know any such person. The court therefore concluded that the name was invented to lure her into the trap.

Detectives later traced items belonging to Akello to a house in Savannah, where Kimathi’s girlfriend, Wairimu, lived. They recovered her underwear and a bloodstained top there. Wairimu, who was the second accused, absconded after being released on bail. The court ordered the trial to continue without her.

A postmortem examination found a laceration at the back of Akello’s head and bruises on her neck. Her tongue was protruding from her mouth. The pathologist concluded that she died of neck compression caused by manual strangulation.

Justice Kimondo ruled that the killing was planned. He held that Akello was deliberately drawn into a scheme to abduct her for ransom and was then murdered, which in his view established malice aforethought.

State prosecutor Millicent Kigira, acting for the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), called 17 witnesses to prove the abduction, the ransom demands and the killing.