President Ruto’s abduction remark was not a confession - CS Murkomen clarifies

Interior Cabinet Secretary Kipchumba Murkomen has come out to clarify remarks by his boss, President William Ruto, that ‘all abducted Kenyans have been reunited with their families’, which had raised concerns of government involvement in the 2024 disappearances.

Speaking on Citizen TV’s JKLive Show on Wednesday, the CS allayed allegations linking the government to the abductions during last year’s Gen Z protests, saying that Ruto only erred in the use of terminology 'abductions', since he was speaking on reported cases.

Murkomen argued that the President used ‘abduction’ to show that he was aware of the reports, but not necessarily because the government was involved, since the right terminology to use would have been ‘missing persons.’

He explained that abduction cases can only be established through investigations, noting that despite reports of over 100 people allegedly disappearing in 2024 alone, they can only be treated as ‘missing persons’ and not ‘abductees’ since there is no conclusive evidence pointing to the latter drawn from investigations.

“The real technical word to be used for abductions is missing persons, because in the first instance of reporting, nobody goes and says that so and so has been abducted because abduction is when you now find the person culpable. It’s just like when you find someone dead, you say someone has been killed, but you will only establish by law whether it is murder or manslaughter once you go through the court process,” he said.

“The President could not have lied to the public because the truth is that there are reports of missing persons, and in the last seven years, there have been about 700 missing persons reported. Last year alone, there were 123, and this year, about 13 people are reported missing.”

The CS added: “It is only investigations that will reveal whether it is abduction, or a case of somebody running out of the country. The President saying he is giving directives to the security agencies that he does not want to hear cases of abductions, it is true because they were reported cases of abductions where citizens late last year and this year recorded statements that they had been abducted and confined in some place and finally released; that was what he was referring to.”

CS Murkomen went on to state that having a general statistic indicating that 123 people are missing in 2024 could not be interpreted to mean that they have been abducted, since others in the same period could have run from home or travelled to other countries unannounced.

“We do not have the numbers because we cannot really say they were abducted because even cases of missing persons that are particularly related to just the protests are not conclusive, but we know that there are cases of people who are still searching for their loved ones; some attributing to the Gen Z and others is generally within that period of time, within the statistics of 123 missing people,” he noted.

“As to which one was targeted specifically by certain people because of their political stands or because of what they were doing, we do not have those statistics of targeted people. That statistic will only be conclusive and move away from missing persons statistics when it is clear that so and so is related to a case of being abducted by criminals or a rogue police officer.”

President Ruto on Monday assured the country that all Kenyans reported missing under suspicious circumstances had been safely reunited with their families as he emphasised his administration's commitment to preventing enforced disappearances.

The sentiments raised concerns with Kenyans wondering whether they were an admission of guilt.

The Interior CS, while on a tour in Marsabit earlier on, also dismissed the same claims, underscoring that when the government says it has stopped abductions, it shouldn’t be interpreted to mean that it was doing the same.

“Many people misunderstood the President…the fact that we’re saying we have stopped abductions is the same way we are saying we have stopped drug trafficking or illegal mining in Moyale, it doesn’t mean we were the ones doing it,” he clarified.