By PAUL GITAU
An embarrassed police force was struggling to weave fresh tales to explain its inability to find bodies in two sites it believe were mass graves.
Two hours of digging by hired villagers came to nothing and truckloads of policemen were asked to remain at “grave” sites mute and looking for corpses.
The bodies failed to turn up even after police claim to have brought a suspect they are holding on site who positively identified the alleged graves.
Ali Komora, the detained chief of Ozi, told the police he had been told “people were buried here without a permit”, but police appear not to have verified these claims.
Dr Mbuuko Ngali and Dr Irene Muramba, the pathologists who had been brought to the sites, flew back to Mombasa.
Ngali hypothesised that one of the alleged graves showed evidence of recent human flesh and added that the stench from there was consistent with decaying human flesh.
NO TRACE OF HUMAN FLESH
“We are still searching. So far nothing has been found but our teams are still in the field,” said a shell-shocked Coast PPO Aggrey Adoli last evening, even as it became clear that no human corpse was in the two sites that had been touted as mass graves two days earlier.
Adoli’s “confirmation” of the mass graves was one of the reasons for the decision by police to obtain a court order on Wednesday to dig up the “mass graves”.
The PPO claimed the search was still going on even after journalists and aid agencies had confirmed to The Standard that the “exhumation” had ended with the only discovery of a smelly tissue believed to be part of a human leg.
After locking down a forested river bank in Ozi village for days and denying journalists and aid agencies access to the alleged mass graves, the Government’s elaborate drama came crumbling as a hoax.
