The murder of baby Samantha Pendo in Kenya, police brutality and the long wait for justice

Seven years after their young daughter was killed during a brutal midnight police operation in Kenya at a time of post-election tension, Joseph Oloo Abanja and Lensa Achieng are still filled with emotion as the case against the alleged officers involved has been delayed once further. .

“It’s a scar that will never go away,” Mrs Achieng, a hotel worker, tells the BBC about the death of six-month-old Samantha Pendo, with a broken skull and internal bleeding.

After every postponement or small event, the couple is inundated with calls. Every moment of expectation leads to disappointment in your search for justice.

The family lives in the western city of Kisumu, an opposition stronghold where riots broke out in August 2017 amid anger over the results of an election that was eventually reheld due to irregularities.

Their small house was next to a road in the Nyalenda informal settlement that witnessed protests on August 11, in which riot police were deployed.

That night the couple locked their wooden door and blocked it with furniture. Around midnight they heard their neighbors’ doors being broken and some of their occupants being beaten.

It wasn’t long before police officers arrived at his door.

“They hit and kicked her several times (but) I refused to open,” Abanja tells the BBC, adding that she begged them to forgive her family of four.

But the beating continued until officers found a small gap through which they threw a tear gas canister into the one-room house, forcing the family to leave.

Abanja says he was ordered to lie down in front of the door and then the beating started.

“They were going for my head, so I put my hands up and they hit me until they couldn’t take it anymore.”

His wife left the house with Samantha, who was having difficulty breathing due to the tear gas, and was also not saved.

“They continued to beat me (with clubs) while I was holding my daughter,” says Mrs Achieng.

The next thing she felt was her daughter hugging her tightly “as if she was in pain.”

“I turned her around and what was coming out of her mouth? It was foam.”

She screamed that her daughter had been killed and it was at this point that the beatings stopped and Mr Abanja was ordered to administer first aid.

The baby came to but was seriously injured.

The couple says the officers quickly left and neighbors helped them take Samantha to the hospital. He died after three days in intensive care.

His search for justice has been long and frustrating, like that of dozens of others caught up in the post-election violence.

Twelve police officers were expected to be charged with murder, rape and torture, but the hearing at which this will take place, when they will be asked to plead guilty, has not yet taken place.

One of the victims’ lawyers, Willys Otieno, believes that the delay is due to the lack of political will to provide justice to the victims of electoral violence.

Uhuru Kenyatta won the re-election later in 2017; the opposition candidate withdrew from the race. His deputy William Ruto, with whom he later fell out, emerged victorious in the next vote and took office in September 2022.

“The state is no longer interested in prosecuting the perpetrators, (and) it is now left to the victims’ lawyers – those of us who work with non-governmental organizations and human rights groups to press for charges to be registered and accused people go to trial,” Otieno tells the BBC.

He accuses the current Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) of “acting as the accused’s lawyer.”

“It is not even the defendants who have requested a postponement before the court, but the Public Prosecutor’s Office who has requested before the court a postponement of the presentation of statements,” the lawyer said of two failed attempts to plead guilty in October and last November.

The third attempt was due to take place two days ago, but was postponed due to the transfer of the presiding judge and was rescheduled for the end of the month.

The Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions (ODPP) told the BBC it could not respond to a request for comment, but posted on X that “the case remains one of the most high-profile in recent history, and the death of Baby Pendo “symbolizes the tragic results of police brutality during the 2017 post-election unrest.”

But those involved in the case find the delays worrying.

“It was the People’s Prosecutor’s Office that initiated this case, and they were the ones who approached us several years ago. They asked us to join a victim support group that was essentially established to ensure that they had witnesses to case,” Irungu Houghton, head of the human rights group Amnesty International Kenya, tells the BBC.

After initial investigations, then Public Prosecutor Nurdin’ Hajji launched a public inquiry into the death of baby Samantha. The judge found the police guilty.

The prosecutor subsequently ordered new investigations into other cases resulting from the August 2017 police operation and convened independent constitutional investigative bodies, civil society and the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.

The investigation uncovered evidence that, according to the PDP, pointed to the “systematic use of violence, including murder, torture, rape and other forms of sexual violence, against civilians, all of which constitute serious violations of human rights and crimes against humanity.” .

In October 2022, the prosecutor attempted to have charges brought against the suspects, for the first time in Kenya’s history under the International Crimes Act.

Among those charged are commanders held accountable for their responsibility as senior officers, another first in Kenya.

A new DDP, Renson M. Ingonga, took office in September 2023, but there has been little progress in the case since then.

There appears to be “a lack of will to try to pursue this case,” Houghton says.

Otieno says victims’ lawyers could consider seeking justice through a private process or approaching the East African Court of Justice or the International Criminal Court if delays continue.

Samantha’s parents support this idea because they say that without justice they cannot heal: each postponement reopens their wounds.

“It doesn’t matter how I do it, but I will make sure that justice is done,” says Abanja, now 40 and earning a living as a tuk-tuk taxi driver.

“Because they took away something that is very valuable to me: she was everything to me, that girl I named after my mother.”