The NGO Human Right Watch (HRW) has denounced that a lawyer awaiting verdict in a witness tampering case before the International Criminal Court (ICC) was found dead at his home in the capital, Nairobi, on September 26, 2022, and has urged the opening of an investigation to determine the motive for the death.
Paul Gicheru, the accused, had been awaiting a verdict in his trial on alleged witness tampering charges related to a case against Kenyan President William Ruto, the organization has learned.
For this reason, HRW has called on Kenyan authorities, with the assistance of the ICC, to investigate Gicheru’s death in a «prompt, thorough and transparent» manner, after reporting that his initial autopsy results were inconclusive.
«With the death of Paul Gicheru and the end of the ICC case against him, Kenyans will once again be denied a piece of the truth, this time about efforts to interfere with getting to the bottom of accountability for ethnically motivated killings and reprisals during Kenya’s 2007 war and 2008 post-election violence,» said the NGO’s international justice director, Elizabeth Evenson.
«The Kenyan police should investigate his death in a thorough and transparent manner,» she added.
Claims of witness interference dogged the ICC’s efforts to get to the truth about who was responsible for alleged crimes against humanity during Kenya’s 2007 post-election violence.
Gicheru was one of three people wanted by the court on witness tampering charges. He surrendered to the court in November 2020, following pre-trial proceedings, which began in February 2022 and concluded in July 2022. Two others remain subject to outstanding arrest warrants, according to HRW.
Decisions in the case against Ruto and a co-defendant, in which charges were quashed in 2016, suggested that there were «systematic efforts» to corrupt witnesses, including through bribes.
In late 2014, one witness, Meshack Yebei, disappeared and was later found dead after ICC prosecutors named him as an intermediary in the Gicheru case.
