City blogger’s fingers crashed by abductors in macabre incident

Blogger Peter Amunga at a city hospital. [Photo, Courtesy]

A city blogger is nursing injuries in hospital after a gang attacked him.

Peter Amunga, an education blogger with a huge online following, and a regular on TV and radio interviews, claims he was attacked in broad daylight after attending a meeting at Lavington Mall, in Nairobi.

Mr Amunga runs many Twitter and Facebook accounts touching on education matters.

WhatsAspp groups

He also runs many WhatsAspp groups, where majority of members are teachers, education activists and journalists.

Amunga narrated how the gang that seemed to have been waiting for him, roughed him up on Monday afternoon as he left the mall.

He said he had attended a meeting with managers of an insurance firm and was headed for another when he was violently pulled out of a matatu.

He had picked the matatu to the city centre at about 2pm when the drama unfolded.

Amunga claims his abductors blocked the matatu at gunpoint then forced him out.

“The four men claimed to be from the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission. One had a walkie-talkie. He shouted, saying: “...afande! We have the target”. That was before he mentioned my name and ordered me to alight. They then handcuffed me and dragged me into a waiting car,” said Amunga.

The blogger claims his abductors put a hood over his head and tied his hands using his neck tie.

According to the blogger, they drove from the city to Juja, where the abductors hit his fingers using a hammer and inflicted some injuries on his ankle.

“The crushing of my fingers clearly shows that these people were sent to silence me never to write anything again. They used a hammer that had an axe on the rear side,” he said.

Abandoned him

Amunga said the gang later abandoned him in a thicket and drove off.

He is healing at a city hospital after an operation was done on his fingers on Wednesday.

“After a thorough beating, I feigned death and they ran away. I later managed to gather some strength and hiked a lift to hospital. One of my fingers was almost falling off,” he said.

Amunga said his radical stand on issues in the education sector could be the reason he was attacked.

The matter was reported at Muthangari Police Station under OB No 54/11/10/2018.