Police in Kenya say serial killer suspect has escaped from custody

A Kenyan man who police claim has confessed to murdering and dismembering 42 women has escaped from a Nairobi police cell, along with a dozen other detainees, police said on Tuesday.

Collins Jumaisi, 33, described by police as a “vampire, a psychopath”, was arrested in July after the horrific discovery of mutilated bodies in a garbage dump in a slum in the Kenyan capital.

A Kenya police spokesperson, Resila Onyango, told AFP: “They escaped last night, 13 in total, including the key suspect in the dump murder case.”

She said the other 12 detainees who had also escaped from the police station were all Eritreans.

Jumaisi had appeared in a court in Nairobi on Friday, where the magistrate ordered him to be held for a further 30 days to enable police to complete their investigations.

The remains of 10 women were found in plastic bags at an abandoned quarry in the Nairobi slum of Mukuru, the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights (KNCHR) said last month.

Jumaisi was detained on 15 July near a bar where he had been watching the Euro 2024 football final.

The head of the Directorate of Criminal Investigations, Mohamed Amin, said after the arrest that Jumaisi had confessed to murdering 42 women over a two-year period from 2022, and that his wife had been his first victim.

“We are dealing with a vampire, a psychopath,” Amin said at the time.

The dumped bodies were found just 100 metres from a police station.

The state-funded KNCHR said in July it was carrying out its own investigations into the Mukuru case because “there is a need to rule out any possibility of extrajudicial killings”.

Kenya’s police watchdog, the Independent Police Oversight Authority, had also said it was looking into whether there was any police involvement or a “failure to act to prevent” the killings.

Kenyan police are often accused by rights groups of carrying out unlawful killings or running hit squads, but few have faced justice.