Kenyan police say they have arrested a suspected serial killer who has confessed to murdering 42 women including his wife and dumping their dismembered bodies in a Nairobi rubbish tip.
Since Friday, nine butchered bodies trussed up in plastic bags have been pulled from the dump site in the Mukuru slum area in the south of the capital.
The acting inspector general of police, Douglas Kanja, said the 33-year-old suspect, named as Collins Jumaisi Khalusha, was arrested at about 3am on Monday near a Nairobi bar where he had been watching the Euro 2024 final.
The head of the Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI), Mohamed Amin, told reporters: “We are dealing with a serial killer, a psychopathic serial killer who has no respect for human life. We are dealing with a vampire, a psychopath.”
He said Khalusha claimed the murders took place between 2022 and last Thursday.
“The suspect confessed to have lured, killed and disposed of 42 female bodies at the dumping site,” he said. “Unfortunately, and this is very sad, the suspect alleged that his first victim was his wife … who he strangled to death before dismembering her body and disposing it at the same site.”
The suspect was tracked down after analysis of a phone of one of the victims, Amin said, in a joint operation by the DCI and the national police. As officers swooped, “he was in the process of luring another victim”, Amin said.
Khalusha had confessed to having had “carnal knowledge” of some of his victims, he added.
Officers searched the suspect’s one-room house, located just 100 metres from where the bodies were found, and discovered a machete, nylon sacks, rope, a pair of industrial rubber gloves, a “pink female handbag” and female underwear.
Kanja said autopsies on the victims discovered to date would be carried out on Monday. Eight have been confirmed to be female.
Amin said a second suspect who was caught with a phone belonging to one of the victims had also been arrested.
The discoveries have thrown another spotlight on Kenyan police and put more pressure on the president, William Ruto, who is struggling to contain a crisis over widespread anti-government protests in which dozens of demonstrators were killed.
Kenya’s police watchdog, the Independent Policing Oversight Authority (IPOA), had said on Friday it was looking into whether there was any police connection to the bodies found in the tip, noting that the dump site was close to a police station. IPOA was also investigating whether there had been a “failure to act to prevent” the grisly killings.
Kanja, in office for only a week after the fallout over last month’s protest bloodshed, told reporters last week that all officers at the police post located near the rubbish tip had been transferred.
Tensions ran high at the crime scene over the weekend as volunteers combed through the vast piles of rubbish in the abandoned quarry in search of more victims. Trouble briefly erupted when people tried to take a bag they had hauled out of the pit to the police station and were met with volleys of teargas, an AFP journalist at the scene said.
Kenyan police are often accused by rights groups of using excessive force and carrying out unlawful killings or running hit squads, but few have faced justice.
