Kenya fires 63 senior police officers over graft

NAIROBI. — Sixty-three Kenyan senior police officers have been sacked after vetting unearthed massive corruption in the service, especially in the traffic department.

Administration Police spokesman Masoud Mwinyi was among those dismissed from service.

The fate of 29 other officers hangs in the balance as they will be investigated further by the National Police Service Commission (NPSC), which carried out the vetting. The move follows the vetting of 1 364 officers in an exercise that took 14 months. The officers who were vetted hold the ranks of senior superintendents, superintendents and assistant superintendents.

NPSC chairman Johnston Kavuludi announced the outcome of the vetting at the commission’s headquarters in Nairobi yesterday.

“Through scrutiny of M-Pesa statements, the commission was able to establish that junior officers working in the traffic department regularly transferred fixed amounts of money to some of their seniors, suggesting that they had been given targets,” said Mr Kavuludi.

“Let me assure all police officers and our stakeholders that the decisions have been arrived at after a thorough process and strict adherence to the vetting regulations and standards”, he said.

Kavuludi said officers were found unsuitable for a variety of reasons including human rights abuses, criminal activities, corruption, obstructing the course of criminal justice system, human trafficking, smuggling, forgery of academic certificates, submission of fake bank and M-pesa statements, unprofessional conduct and failure to provide documents or information required by the commission. — Daily Nation/Standard Digital.