IPOA ordered to release details of Pakistan journalist killing probe

The Court of Appeal has upheld a Sh10 million compensation award to the family of slain Pakistani journalist Arshad Sharif.

Justices Daniel Musinga, Mumbi Ngugi and Francis Tuiyott unanimously agreed that Justice Stella Mutuku was right to award Sharif’s family the amount.

However, they said that it was not yet ripe to force the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) to charge the officers who were involved in the shooting in 2022.

Although the bench headed by Justice Musinga said that the Independent Police Oversight Authority (IPOA) cannot be vicariously held liable alongside the National Police Service Commission (NPSC), the DPP, Inspector General of Police and Attorney General, it held that the authority is duty-bound to make public information it obtains during investigations.

“As ‘Wanjiku’s watchman’, IPOA cannot sit on the sidelines, fold its hands and proclaim that it has carried out its investigations and cannot release information unless the DPP authorises it to.

“We say this for two reasons. First, it must make public the response it receives concerning its recommendations, either for prosecution or disciplinary action: Section 6(a) of the IPOA Act provides that IPOA shall ‘make public the response received to these recommendations,' the judges said.

On the DPP, the court said that the ball was on his court as IPOA had made its recommendations for charging the officers.

The reason why Sharif was killed remains a mystery. At the same time, it ended up hanging as IPOA and DPP pointed fingers at each other on who failed to act.

On one hand, the authority said it had done the investigations and forwarded the file to the DPP for action. On the other hand, the DPP said he had sent back the file with pointers to gaps he needed sealed.

Sharif allegedly fled his motherland in July 2022 to avoid arrest for criticising the country’s powerful military, only to be shot dead in Kajiado, in what the police later described as a case of mistaken identity.

Police admitted to the killing that occurred on October 23, 2022.

Police claimed to have been trailing a different vehicle, a Mercedes Benz Sprinter Van KDJ 700F, allegedly stolen from Pangani. But Sharif was in a Toyota Land Cruiser (V8) KDG 200M.

The presence of at least six Americans at AmmoDump Ranch, Kajiado County and their airlift after the shooting added a new twist to the whole saga.

Documents filed in court by IPOA indicated that the six were invited by the United States Embassy in Nairobi and left shortly after the incident.

Investigators indicated that they were not in AmmoDump Ranch, a day after Sharif was shot dead.

However, OPOA in its exchanges with the DPP said that they were seeking to know from the Embassy why there were no statements from the six, what they had gone to do in the property and records of all their activities.

It also stated that they were seeking information on how they gained entry to Kenya and on whose
invitation. The authority stated that the US Embassy had confirmed that the six had conducted multiple training courses for Kenya Police Officers in October 2022.

It stated that a similar letter to that of the Embassy was written to the Inspector General of Police, but he had not replied yet.

The correspondences between IPOA and DPP were contained in a case filed by Sharif’s widow Javera Siddique, the Kenya Union of Journalists and the Kenya Correspondents Association, who accused IPOA, DPP, Inspector General of Police, and National Police Service Commission of failing to charge the police officers who killed the deceased.

Officers from the GSU camp in Magadi are said to have shot at the vehicle in which the journalist was travelling after the driver allegedly defied orders by the police to stop.

The then-police spokesman, Bruno Shioso, said the officers from GSU had been informed by their counterparts in Nairobi that a car with similar registration details to the one Sharif was driving was reported stolen in Nairobi.

However, IPOA’s report in court indicated a different story.

At the time Sharif was killed, he was travelling alongside his brother, Khurram Ahmed, along the Kueni-Kamukuru Murram road in the interior of Kajiado County.

The police said the officers had erected the roadblock following an alert that another vehicle, a white Mercedes-Benz ML350, whose registration number was given as KDJ 700F, had been stolen in Nairobi’s Ngara area.

However, the IPOA report reads that the vehicle that had been reported by the police to have been stolen from Starehe was cornered at the Delta petrol station at the Magadi-Isinya road junction.