‘Pain of a mother’: families demand justice after deaths near Del Monte farm | Kenya

When Roda Wayua Kimeu woke on Christmas morning, her first thought was her eldest son, Bernard Mutua. For three days she had been searching for him in a river that runs along Del Monte’s pineapple fields at its vast farm near Thika in Kenya.

Bernard, 22, was with a group of about 20 men who were confronted by Del Monte security guards when they went to steal pineapples from the farm on 21 December. Four of them never came home.

His friends said Bernard had last been seen being beaten and pushed into a river by guards employed by the farm, which is the single largest exporter of Kenyan produce to the world.

By mid-morning on Christmas Day, three bodies had already been pulled from the Chania River in the preceding 24 hours; they were Francis Miumi, Mbae Murumbi and another man known as Mkisii. All of them had been with Bernard on the farm that day.

Knowing her son could not swim, Roda, 38, feared the worst. “We were just crying by this time because it was so frustrating,” she told the Guardian. It was only after she moved about 100 metres away from the crowd to find somewhere discreet to urinate that she saw the body floating in the water.

“I screamed and told the other people that it was [Bernard]. I knew him because he has brown skin … His body was swollen and had visible red marks on his back,” she said.

She struggled to recount the horror of the moment. “I cannot describe what I felt. It is the pain of birth, the pain of a mother.”

Bernard’s friends who were with him the night he died said in interviews and sworn statements that they were all chased by Del Monte guards after they were caught in the pineapple field, and that some, including Bernard, hid in the bushes. They claim the guards found the men in the bushes and beat them with metal rods, before pushing Bernard and others into the water. They said they tried to swim and save him but were too late.

Bernard’s postmortem notes “multiple scalp and facial bruises”, and Roda is convinced Del Monte guards played a role in her son’s death. “I am certain [Bernard] could not have tried to get into the river by himself because he couldn’t swim,” she said.

As Roda’s eldest son, Bernard was relied on to support the wider family. Bernard worked as a chef, cooking chapatis at a local restaurant, and his mother struggled to understand why he had joined the group stealing pineapples that day.

“I knew Mutua to be hard-working and … I had always warned them against stealing because I had seen what had happened to other children caught by Del Monte guards,” she said.

In the days that followed, a postmortem for Bernard, Francis and Mbae concluded that they died of drowning but noted injuries. A pathologist that attended on behalf of Del Monte said the men “died because of drowning and the injuries could not have actually resulted to [sic] death”.

Roda told the Guardian she was concerned about Del Monte’s involvement in investigating the deaths. When she saw the Del Monte pathologist among the clinicians at the mortuary, she said she “thought he was there to distort the truth or influence the story around my son’s death”.

Speaking outside the postmortem, Kamanda Mucheke, the deputy director of the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights, said: “The injuries we have seen today are consistent with the eyewitnesses’ accounts that these people were beaten by Del Monte guards. Another fact we have established is that these people were already subdued … that they were being pushed into the river as they were beaten by the guards.”

Roda said: “I don’t have much power to do anything more but I want justice for Bernard.”

Police in Kenya have previously said they were investigating the deaths but did not respond to the Guardian’s latest request for comment.

An investigation by the Guardian and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism has uncovered allegations that representatives of Del Monte Kenya made multiple attempts to bribe groups of men in the weeks after the deaths.

Friends of the dead men who were with them that night claimed in interviews and sworn statements that groups of them were approached by Del Monte representatives in the weeks after the men’s deaths. They said they were offered money and jobs at the farm if they supported their version of events, that the men had run into the river of their own accord after a botched raid and drowned.

The company said it had evidence to contradict the accounts provided by the witnesses. In a statement, Del Monte said: “We have submitted our evidence, which contradicts the information you have presented, to the appropriate legal authorities.”

In a remote village near Mwingi, Kitui County, Francis Miumi’s family gathered last month to bury their son. Three small pieces of canvas provided strips of shade from the hot sun for dozens of mourners while others gathered under a thorn tree near the red dirt grave.

His mother, Rachael Ngoki Kilule, struggled to talk through tears. She said the family “need to know the truth about his death”.

His brother, Benjamin Mwandikwa Kilule, said Francis’s body had injury marks and “the ribs looked like he had been pricked”. His postmortem noted “superficial soft tissue injuries due to multiple blunt-force trauma” and a photo of his body seen by the Guardian has visible head injuries.

Benjamin said he wanted the authorities “to get to the bottom of this so that those who killed him can be held responsible”. If his brother was in the wrong, he said, “they should have just arrested him”.