Kenya: bodies in mass graves came from hospital morgue, police finds

At least 33 bodies exhumed from a mass grave in western Kenya were transferred from a hospital morgue, police said on Thursday.

The bodies were exhumed on Wednesday in the town of Kericho. At least 25 children are among those pulled from the mass grave at a church-owned cemetery.

“We were able to establish that these were bodies transferred from Nyamira District Hospital to a private cemetery in Kericho,” Mohamed Amin, the head of the Directorate of Criminal Investigations, told reporters.

Homicide detectives exhumed 33 bodies — eight adults and 25 children, including foetuses — and dismembered body parts packed in gunny bags, according to authorities.

Amin said detectives wanted to find out whether the bodies were disposed legally after being removed from a morgue. Under Kenyan law, hospitals and morgues are required to dispose bodies that are unclaimed for more than 14 days. The process requires authorization by court order.

Third mass-grave incident in three years

On Thursday, government pathologists conducted autopsies to determine cause of death. Their identities have not been revealed.

At least two people have been arrested. Some in the local press, citing witnesses, say unidentified people brought the bodies from elsewhere in a vehicle belonging to the government and hurriedly buried them.

Some of the gravediggers are said to have alerted the police.

“We need authorities to conduct a thorough investigation,” said resident Brian Kibunja. Another local, Samuel Moso, said authorities should “reveal if the government was involved or if a different group of people was behind the mass burial.”

This is the third major mass-grave incident in Kenya over the last three years. In the most prominent one, police uncovered hundreds of bodies buried in a forest in the Kenyan coastal region of Kilifi in 2023.

The bodies were exhumed from mass graves linked to a religious leader who starved his followers to death.

In 2024, authorities recovered 9 bodies from a dumpsite in Nairobi, the capital. The latest discovery coincides with growing concern among some Kenyans over alleged rights abuses, including extra-judicial killings allegedly perpetrated by the police.

Missing Voices, a human rights group, has documented 125 extrajudicial killings and 6 enforced disappearances over the last year in Kenya. The number of extrajudicial killings was 104 the previous year.