Standard: Police have seized a car reportedly used by hooded gunmen during the killings of Kabete MP George Muchai, his two bodyguards and a driver. The white Toyota Spacio belongs to a female insurance executive, police said, but it emerged that they released the car without subjecting it to a thorough forensic analysis.

The woman told police she was carjacked and abandoned at Kamandura on the Narok-Nairobi highway hours after Muchai and his aides were killed. She, together with a female passenger, were questioned on Monday and yesterday. Apart from the women, more than 10 people including witnesses of the attack have been questioned.

They include two street children who witnessed it, Muchai’s family and attendants at the bar where he was before his death. The women said they spent almost six hours in the car’s boot and they at one point heard gunshots at unspecified place within the city. Police have concluded the gunshots were at the murder scene.

And senior police officers at Kikuyu police station are now under investigation after they released the car to the owner on Sunday without conducting a thorough forensic analysis. This, police said, led to loss of evidence through fingerprints being erased which could have helped identify the killers.

The officers reportedly took brief statements from the women and released the car to them without dusting it, after the victims told them they were not interested in pursuing the case because they had recovered the vehicle.

The car was later picked up by police from its owner on Monday evening after witnesses at the shooting incident said the vehicle used by the attackers resembled a Probox and was white.

According to the women, four hooded gunmen who had an AK47 rifle and three pistols attacked them in Gachie, Kiambu, as they drove home on Friday at about 10pm. The gang took over the car before bundling them into the boot.

They told police they, at one point, drove up to a club at Parklands where one of the gunmen walked and came back with drinks. From there, they drove towards Kikuyu and later headed back to Westlands. On Waiyaki Way, the gang tried to block a BMW but failed after the driver made a wrong turn and escaped, said one of the women.

“The women say they think the gang wanted a powerful car to use in their mission but could not get the BMW after the driver managed to escape,” said an officer aware of the probe. At one point, the women said they heard the gang argue in their Kikuyu dialect on why their gang leader agreed to take half of the fee for their mission. Later, they told police, the gang drove at a high speed possibly in pursuit of a car before they heard gunshots after the vehicle stopped in the city centre. The gun shots are believed to have been those that killed MP George Muchai.

Details have emerged that the 2008 Olympic Marathon champion Samwel Wanjiru was killed by blunt force to his head and not by falling from balcony, Chief Pathologist Johansen Oduor on Tuesday told the court. Samuel Wanjiru died mysteriously in May 2011.

It was alleged that he died after falling off a balcony at his home in Nyahururu following a domestic dispute but the cause of his death remained uncertain.

Sammy Wanjiru, who set a blistering pace to shatter the 24-year-old Olympic record in the marathon, becoming the youngest winner of the event, died aged 24. He was Kenya’s first marathon champion.

News reports following his death quoted the police saying that Samuel Wanjiru had jumped from the balcony of his home after his wife, Triza Njeri, arrived to find him with another woman.

Samuel Wanjiru had been going through a troubled period in his life. In December 2010, he was charged with threatening to kill his wife and with illegal possession of an AK-47 assault rifle. His wife withdrew the attempted-murder charge against him, saying they had reconciled. He was scheduled to appear in court a few days before he died on the firearms charge.

CORD Senator Johnstone Muthama has been named as one of the 238 Kenyans who have hidden colossal amounts of money in a mega Swiss bank. This is after details of accounts Switzerland based HSBC Bank were leaked by a former employee to the French government.

The report alleged that a certain Kenyan had stashed over Sh. 3 billion in a Swiss bank.

Mr. Johnstone Muthama, nonetheless, is linked to two accounts named as Rocklands96 and 20443NM opened in 1996 and closed in 2,000. “HSBC files recorded Muthama’s name in connection with the client account ‘ROCKLAND96’, which was set up in 1996 and closed in 2000. Johnstone Muthama was also linked to the numbered client account ‘20443NM’ over the same period. Bank files listed eight of his relatives also linked to the numbered account. The leaked files do not specify the exact role he had in relation to the accounts,” the leaks state.

Mr. Muthama confirmed to a team of journalists under the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists that indeed he was aware of the Rockland96 account which he said was opened in 1996. He is described by the leaks as ‘a wealthy gemstone magnate’. Currently, though, Johnstone Muthama has denied operating foreign bank accounts.

According to the leaks dubbed ‘Swiss Leaks’, a total of 742 clients, both Kenyan nationals and others with links to Kenya have deposited a total of 51.28 billion shillings in 1,093 accounts with the bank. “Some 463 accounts were opened between 1975 and 2006. At least 742 clients are associated with Kenya out of which 32 per cent have a Kenyan passport or nationality,” it says.

The leaked HSBC files offer a rare glimpse inside one of the world’s most private banking systems. They show the bank’s dealings with clients engaged in a spectrum of illegal behaviour, especially in hiding hundreds of millions of dollars from tax authorities.

The owner of a Mercedes Benz suspected to have been involved in the dawn killing of Kabete MP George Muchai was yesterday questioned by the police regarding the fateful shooting. This was after the Mercedes Benz was captured by CCTV cameras close to the scene of shooting. The owner, who appeared at the Central police Station on Sunday said that he and his two friends had stopped briefly at the scene of crime on their way home.

They had arrived there a short while after the shooting had occurred and before the police arrived at the scene. They would most likely be the first persons captured by the CCTV cameras to have arrived at the scene first. They were driving home from club Tamasha, which is located in Hurlingham.

However, sources indicated that police detectives do not regard them as suspects, and are instead following leads on a Toyota Probox suspected to have been carrying the shooters. Strikingly, it was yesterday revealed that the CCTV footage handed over to police detectives by the Nairobi County was poor and unreliable. Subsequently, police are more relying on CCTV footage captured by installations on private buildings.

In one of the CCTV footage, the vehicle believed to have carried out the attack is seen driving from Kenyatta Avenue to Moi Avenue shortly after the shooting. In another CCTV footage captured by private cameras near the Globe Cinema roundabout, the vehicle is seen driving out of town.

Yesterday, the detectives visited the Galielo Lounge as they sought to question two women who were captured by the Galileo cameras sitting very close to the late MP George Muchai. They then spent hours at George Muchai’s Kamulu home questioning as they tried to re-correct his last engagements.