100 killed as femicide epidemic takes alarming turn in Kenya
Nairobi, Kenya (PANA) - Femicide, the murder of women, because they are women, has continued to rise with at least 100 women killed over the last three months, Kenya's Prime Cabinet Secretary Musalia Mudavadi said on Thursday.
At least 100 women were killed between August and November 2024, according to a Police Directorate recently created by the government to probe the rising cases of the murder of women and ensure seamless prosecution.
Mudavadi, who is also Kenya's acting Interior Cabinet Secretary, said the Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) had completed investigations into the murder of 97 women, while others were still pending before various courts.
Experts say cases of targeted killings because of gender demonstrate rising inequality between men and women because women were targeted entirely because of their gender.
Kenya also recorded 7,107 cases of sexual and gender-based violence from September to 19 December. 2024, Mudavadi said while releasing a report by the DCI.
The rising cases of gender-based violence showed an alarming turn from 2019, with the outbreak of the Covid-19, which was followed by lockdowns, which contributed to the increased cases of femicide.
In 2023, the Media Council of Kenya reported 150 femicide cases. These cases followed a worrying trend of prominent women killed mostly in crimes of passion.
“The worrying trend of femicide has brought to the fore the violations of the women's rights,” Mudavadi told reporters.
Bizarre cases of involuntary disappearances amongst women and the targeting of female university students have alarmingly become a commonality in Kenya in recent years.
In 2018, then Governor of Migori County, in the Western region, near the Kenyan border with Tanzania, was accused of the murder of Sharon Otieno, 24, a university student who had helped his political campaigns.
Sharon and her unborn baby, were found murdered while a journalist who had been pursuing the case involving an alleged extortion, escaped kidnappers.
The suspects in the case have challenged the authorities for allegedly accusing them with the murder of an unborn child, arguing the suspects were charged with an offence which did not exist in law since unborn children did not have a legal status.
In 2019, University Student Ivy Wangeci, a medical student at a university, was hacked to death in broad daylight in Eldoret, western Kenya, by an enraged lover.
In 2020, Tecra Muigai, the heiress of a large beer manufacturing enterprise known as Keroche Industries, was murdered while on holiday with her lover Omar Lali.
An inquest into the death later ruled that Lali was criminally liable.
The Kenyan cabinet has established a Presidential Working Group to develop comprehensive policies to deal with cases of femicide in Kenya.
As a result of the intensified investigations into the femicide cases, police, recently broke a multiple murder mystery in Nairobi.
The bodies of a woman and her close relatives were found in different locations and linked to one suspect. The victims of the October 2024 murder mystery included Amina Abdirashid Dahir, 22, Nusayba Abdi, 13, and Waris Daud, 38, a mother and her daughter and niece, Nuseiba Dahir.
-0- PANA AO/RA 19Dec2024
