A Kenyan High Court has sentenced former university student Duncan Livingstone Kimathi, 37, to death for murdering his colleague Sarah Akello Aruwa in a case involving abduction and ransom demands.
Justice Kanyi Kimondo handed down the sentence on Thursday, October 29, after finding Kimathi guilty of killing Aruwa between June 30 and July 1, 2012, in Kiamako, Githunguri, Kiambu County.
The prosecution, led by Millicent Kigira, called 17 witnesses during the trial. The court heard that Aruwa, a final-year International Relations student at the United States International University-Africa (USIU-Africa), disappeared after telling a friend she planned to meet a man she had previously encountered at the university library.
Her family later received calls demanding KSh100,000 for her release. Her mother, Hellen Atieno Aruwa, testified that she negotiated the amount down to KSh70,000 before reporting the matter to Kasarani Police Station.
Investigators subsequently recovered the victim’s undergarments and a blood-stained top from a house in Savannah where Kimathi’s girlfriend lived. A postmortem examination established that Aruwa died from manual strangulation.
The court found that Kimathi had deliberately lured Aruwa into a trap and that the circumstances of the abduction and killing demonstrated malice aforethought. He was convicted under Sections 203 and 204 of Kenya’s Penal Code.
The second accused in the case absconded after being released on bail, and the court directed that proceedings continue in her absence.
Kenya retains the death penalty for murder, but the Supreme Court ruled in 2017 that a mandatory death sentence for murder was unconstitutional, restoring judges’ discretion in sentencing. The ruling did not abolish the death penalty itself.
