Dr Ouko’s maid, Selina Were, who said she saw a “white vehicle” at Ouko’s Koru farm gate in the early hours of the day he disappeared, was said to have died many years ago, taking her secrets to the grave.
The Standard’s front page headline read, ‘Another key witness in Ouko murder dies’ as if there was some mystery to Salina’s death. For good measure The Standard noted that, ‘Interestingly, her death comes just over two months after that of Dr Jason Kaviti, the former Chief Government pathologist’ (who for a while had propounded the theory that Ouko had committed suicide) as if the two deaths were linked. They were not and there was no mystery to Selina Were Ndalo’s death. She had been bitten by a snake a year before and had never fully recovered. Her family was at pains to say that there was no mystery but the journalists just couldn’t help themselves.
Selina Were Ndalo’s death, however, will change little or nothing in the search for the truth behind the murder of Dr Robert Ouko. Her part in the ‘jigsaw’ was all but completed two decades ago. She gave her original testimony to Scotland Yard nearly 22 years ago, and recounted it some 28 times, hardly varying from what she had said in the first place.
(It is true that Selina Were Ndalo did name people, including Dr Ouko’s brother Barrack Mbajah, in the murder of Dr Ouko, accusations which were dismissed by the Kenyan police, but she never altered her story of what she saw and heard on the morning of 13 February, 1990).
Selina told the British Scotland Yard detective John Troon, as he recorded in his final report, that at about 11pm on February 12, 1990, she had locked Ouko’s study door and the main front door at his Koru farm where she worked as his maid or housekeeper.
She also testified that in the early hours of February 13, 1990, ‘she was awakened at about 3pm’ (of which more in a moment) by a noise that sounded to her as if it were a door being slammed. After some minutes she heard an engine, left her room, walked a few yards to a vantage point overlooking the lower gate to the farm (which she could see because of the security lighting) where she saw a white car with its lights on, turning. The vehicle drove down the access road to the farm to the Koru-Muhorini road and turned left in the direction of Muhorini and Selina said she watched it until the car’s lights disappeared from site.
Troon noted in his ‘Final Report’ that just along from where Selina last saw the white car there was ‘an unmade road leading to Got Alila Hill where Ouko’s body was subsequently found’. (Conspiracy theorists might also like to note that if the car had been heading to Nakuru, it would have turned right, not left, at the junction).
If Selina was telling the truth, and she never diverted from her story, the findings of Gor Sunguh’s Parliamentary investigation 15 years after Ouko’s murder which quoted the registration of the white car and stated that there were 20 GSU officers, at least 15 named individuals and ‘a convoy of vehicles’ at the Koru farm that night, could not have been true.
