On the evening of 30th May 2015, as he walked to his home in the cosmopolitan town of Eldoret at the end of a hard day’s work, 63-year-old journalist, John Kituyi, was unaware that he was living his last moments on earth. Shortly after leaving his office at the Mirror Weekly, Kituyi met his untimely death at the hands of unknown assailants riding a motorcycle, when they brutally attacked and bludgeoned him with a blunt object.
At the time of his death, Kituyi was working as the editor and publisher of the Mirror Weekly, a local news publication which he started after leaving his position as the Eldoret bureau chief for The Standard media.
While the motive of the attack has never been established, it is perhaps telling that the attackers only took his phone but left other valuables such as his watch and wallet behind. The injuries inflicted on his body were of such severity, to the extent that Kituyi was pronounced dead after arriving at Eldoret Hospital, where he had been rushed for treatment.
As reports of Kituyi’s murder were received with shock by members of the media fraternity, speculation turned to whether there was a sinister motive behind the killing, that could perhaps be connected to his work as an investigative journalist. It was around this time that the cases against those named as bearing the greatest responsibility for the 2007 post-election violence in Kenya, were going on at the International Criminal Court in the Hague.
There were media reports in circulation alleging interference of witnesses by some of the accused persons, including accusations of bribery and forced disappearances. Just prior to his murder, Kituyi had published a story touching on the disappearance of a witness named Meshack Yebei, who had been a witness for the defense in the case of then Deputy President William Ruto, but had later crossed over to become a key witness for the prosecution. Yebei’s dead body was discovered inside Tsavo National Park, after a prolonged search following his suspicious disappearance.
According to the Committee for the Protection of Journalists, they received unsubstantiated information from two local journalists investigating Kituyi’s murder, claiming that he was killed because of his probe into the disappearance of Yebei. Police investigations into Kituyi’s murder resulted in the arrest of a suspect who was found in the possession of Kituyi’s mobile phone sim card. The suspect, Nicholas Kavili, was a soldier in Kenya’s defense forces, but after the prosecution failed to make the murder charges stick, he was acquitted in 2018 due to lack of evidence. No one else has ever been brought to book since.
The Media Council of Kenya, through it’s then CEO, Harun Mwangi, promised to pursue the matter of Kituyi’s murder probe, however nothing has ever come of it.