Two to hang for daring heist at wholesale shop

At around 3pm on June 24, 2007, in Narok town, Abdi Yusuf was at his business, Yusuf Wholesalers, and his employees were ferrying goods from the store to the front of the shop for display on the shelves.

One of his employees was attending to customers when a gang of six robbers accosted them at the shop. They were armed with an AK 47 rifle and two pistols.

One of them, who was later identified in an identification parade as Robert Kariuki, pointed a gun at Yusuf’s head and ordered him to lie down.

Yusuf however, defied the order and instead walked to the back of the shop to pick up stones to fight the robbers. When he came back, he found they had already fled and cleared the cash register of Sh250,000.

Employees at the shop were able to identify the second robber as Timothy Thiga saying it was he who took the money and stashed it into a carton which they carted away with them.

Kennedy Momanyi, a taxi operator in the town, was their second victim. The two hired him for Sh100 and jumped into his car. Kariuki was in the passenger seat, while Thiga sat in the back seat with a black bag from where he withdrew a gun which he pointed at Momanyi.

The taxi driver was later discovered by two police officers on routine patrol. He had been left tied up and covered with a blanket after the gang abandoned his car. Acting on information from the public, the officers found out that Thiga and Kariuki had boarded a Nissan Matatu bound for Nairobi and they set up a road block. When the identified vehicle showed up, police asked passengers to disembark and they flushed out the two who attempted to run. They were arrested and charged with robbery with violence.

The two claimed to be strangers who met for the first time in the matatu but they were nonetheless charged jointly, convicted and sentenced to death for the offense.

Dissatisfied with the trial court’s decision, they appealed the ruling but it was dismissed by the High Court, and this led to their second appeal at the Court of Appeal sitting in Nakuru.

They were however, unsuccessful after Court of Appeal Judges Phillip Waki and Patrick Kiage, on November 17, 2016, upheld the ruling by the two lower courts.