Four police officers in Makueni County are under investigation after a one-and-a-half-year-old baby died in their custody in harrowing circumstances.
The officers from Kalembe Police Station in Kambu area are alleged to have slapped and seriously injured the child while arresting his mother on Wednesday, May 29, afternoon over an alleged debt.
The child died in custody hours later on Wednesday night after the mother Zipporah Muteti was locked up and reportedly denied a chance to seek medical attention for her injured baby.
The arresting officer is alleged to have missed slapping the woman and hit the child instead. By law, police officers are not allowed to intervene in civil matters like debt collection.
The woman, a retail shopkeeper at Kambu market along Nairobi- Mombasa road, said she watched helplessly as her child died hours later after writhing in pain for a long time.
According to the child’s mother, she had a disagreement with a fellow trader in the same market who she had advanced goods worth Sh1,465 a week earlier.
“While arresting me, the police officer assaulted me and one of the slaps hit my innocent child whom I had saddled on my back,” said Ms Muteti on the matter that is now under investigation.
She alleged the complainant in the case was a friend ofone of the officers, who vowed to teach her a lesson.
“Once in custody, I requested for help to have the crying baby attended to but the officers at the station’s report desk turned a deaf ear to my pleas for compassion,” she said.
The baby reportedly started vomiting while in the stuffy and poorly ventilated police cells and became unconscious and subsequently unresponsive, prompting loud wailing from the mother and other inmates.
Upon sensing they had made blunders by illegally booking a child in custody, the officers are alleged to have released the mother and her dead child towards midnight.
Ms Muteti alleged the officers turned against her with claims that she had strangled her own child in order to fix them and have them arrested for murder, as they escorted her out of the station.
Her demands to obtain an Occurrence Book report for both her arrest and the death of her child in custody were fruitless, as the officers on duty literally chased her away.
At the Kambu Hospital mortuary, the child was certified as having died two hours earlier, but the body couldn’t be admitted because the mother didn’t have the mandatory OB report.
