Nairobi    -   Red-faced Kenyan police on Tuesday arrested eight of their own officers and launched a manhunt after a man accused of murdering and dismembering 42 women escaped from a Nairobi police cell along with a dozen other people. The escapees include Collins Jumaisi, 33, described by police as a “vampire, a psychopath”, who was arrested last month after the horrific discovery of mutilated bodies in a dump in a slum of the Kenyan capital. Jumaisi and the 12 others, all Eritrean nationals, appeared to have escaped by cutting through a wire mesh roof at the police station. “Our preliminary investigations indicate that the escape was aided by insiders,” acting national police chief Gilbert Masengeli said in a statement.

He told reporters that eight officers on duty at the time have been suspended and “placed in custody”, adding that the matter was being investigated by the Internal Affairs Unit. Police said they discovered the breakout when officers made a routine visit to the cells at around 5 am to serve the prisoners breakfast.

“On opening the cell door, they discovered that 13 prisoners had escaped by cutting the wire mesh in the basking bay,” police said, referring to a covered courtyard area in the station where detainees could get access to fresh air. The 12 Eritreans had been arrested for being in Kenya illegally, police said, adding that four others who did not escape were helping with the investigation. The police station is located in the upmarket Nairobi district of Gigiri, home to the regional headquarters of the United Nations and numerous embassies.

Police under spotlight

It is the second time in barely six months that a suspect in a high-profile case has escaped from custody. Kenyan national Kevin Kangethe, who is accused of murdering his girlfriend in the United States last year and leaving her body in an airport car park, fled a police station in February before being caught about a week later. Jumaisi had appeared in a court in the Kenyan capital on Friday, when the magistrate ordered him to be held for a further 30 days to enable police to complete their investigations.

The head of the Directorate of Criminal Investigations, Mohamed Amin, said after his arrest on July 15 that Jumaisi had confessed to murdering 42 women over a two-year period from 2022, with his wife his first victim.

“We are dealing with a vampire, a psychopath,” Amin said at the time.

Jumaisi said he had been molested and tortured, his lawyer told AFP last month.

Ten butchered female bodies trussed up in plastic bags were found in a dump in an abandoned quarry in the Nairobi slum of Mukuru, the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights (KNCHR) said last month.

The grisly find shocked Kenyans, already reeling from the so-called Shakahola forest massacre after the discovery of more than 400 bodies in mass graves near the Indian Ocean coast.

A Kenyan cult leader is accused of inciting his followers to starve themselves to death in order to prepare for the end of the world and “meet Jesus”. He faces numerous charges including terrorism, murder and child cruelty along with dozens of co-defendants.

The Mukuru find threw a fresh spotlight on Kenya’s police force as the bodies were found just 100 metres (yards) from a police station.

The state-funded KNCHR said in July it was carrying out its own investigations into the Mukuru case because “there is a need to rule out any possibility of extrajudicial killings”.

Kenya’s police watchdog, the Independent Police Oversight Authority, had also said it was looking into whether there was any police involvement or a “failure to act to prevent” the killings.

Kenyan police are often accused by rights groups of carrying out unlawful killings or running hit squads, but few have faced justice.