Arrested Monday, a Kenyan man admitted to killing at least 42 women, including his wife over two years.
Officials claimed that 33-year-old Collins Jumaisi Khalusha killed his most recent victim up to four days before his detention Monday in a murder spree spanning at least till 2022.
“We are dealing with a serial killer, a psychopathic serial killer who has no respect for life,” Kenyan head of criminal investigations Mohamed Amin said Monday in Nairobi during a news conference on the arrest.
Nine remains, “severely dismembered, in different states of decomposition, and left in sacks,” have already been retrieved from an abandoned waste site close to his house. Monday is supposed to be a post-mortem review of the remains.
About 3 a.m. local time Monday in Soweto, east of Kenya’s capital, Khalusha was arrested outside of a bar he had visited to watch the European 2024 soccer championship final.
Under interrogation, the defendant admitted to having lured, slain, and disposed of 42 female victims at the disposal site,” all died between 2022 and July 11, Amin added.
Officials claim that another suspect who was captured with a victim’s phone has also been apprehended in relation.
Following his detention, Kenyan police—who were monitoring Khalusha’s cell phone signal—said that he admitted to “having lured, killed and disposed of 42 female bodies,” including his wife and another lady between 2022 and July of this year.
Before dismembering his wife, Imelda Judith Khalenya, police claimed he strangled her to death and disposed of her body at the dump site where later more victims were discovered.
“It is the transaction of a mobile money transfer using Josephine Owino’s phone number that led detectives to track the suspect,” Amin told reporters, referring to one of the claimed victims who was reported as missing.
Local authorities first started last week to search an abandoned quarry in Kware for the remains of some of the victims thought to be 18 to 30-year-old women packed into bags; the alleged killer leased a house roughly 300 feet away.
It occurred during the trial of a doomsday cult leader accused of terrorism based on the murders of almost 400 of his adherents in an unconnected case.
Police displayed several items they said were discovered in Khalusha’s one-room apartment at Monday’s news conference: ten cell phones, twenty-four SIM cards, six male and two female ID cards, a pair of rubber gloves, twelve nylon sacks, ropes, gloves, deeds, female panties, and a machete police believe was used to dismember some of his claimed victims.
Seeing an increase in feticide cases, a group of female leaders on Monday demanded better safety for Kenyan women.
“Those ladies might have been killed today, but which woman is next in line?” Leah Sankaire Sopiato, a kajiado legislator, asked. “That someone who killed 42 people was still prowling about is depressing. Women’s lives count and have to be safeguarded.”
This episode coincides with Kenya’s recent, most recent by landing Kenyan troops in gang-plagued Haiti as part of a multinational, concrete measures in recent months to closer associate itself with the United States and establish itself on the world scene. mission in peacekeeping.
In May, President Joe Biden declared he plans to name Kenya a “Major Non-NATO Ally,” a classification assigned to nations “with close and strategic working relationships with the U.S. military and defense civilians.”
As demonstrations broke out in Nairobi minutes after legislators passed the proposal, Kenyan President William Ruto weeks ago withdrew a contentious tax bill a day after police shot and killed 22 people and injured more than 200 protestors who stormed the Parliament building.
That led police to open fire on the enraged gathering opposing a measure increasing taxes in a country where many already struggle to pay bills and support their families.
