Kenyan Police Arrest Collins Jumaisi Khalusha in Kware Dumpsite Killings and Say He Confessed to 42
Days after dismembered bodies were found at a Nairobi quarry, police arrested Khalusha and said he confessed to killing 42 women, beginning with his wife in 2022.
Published
Police in Nairobi arrested Collins Jumaisi Khalusha, 33, at about 3 a.m. on Monday, July 15, 2024, outside a club where he had gone to watch the final of the European soccer championship. Later that day, the country's chief detective stood before reporters and called him a serial killer. "We are dealing with a serial killer, a psychopathic serial killer who has no respect for life," said Mohamed Amin, head of Kenya's Directorate of Criminal Investigations.
The arrest came days after the first remains of women were found the previous week, stuffed into sacks around an abandoned quarry used as a dumpsite in Kware, in the Mukuru kwa Njenga settlement. Nine bodies had been recovered by the day of the arrest, severely dismembered and in different states of decomposition, and post-mortem examinations were expected that day. Khalusha, police said, rented a house about 300 feet from the quarry.
According to Amin, Khalusha confessed under interrogation to luring, killing and disposing of 42 women at the site, beginning in 2022 and as recently as July 11, 2024, four days before his arrest. The first, police said, was his wife, Imelda Judith Khalenya, whom he told detectives he had strangled before dismembering her body and dumping it at the quarry. None of it had been tested in any court. The count of 42 rested entirely on what police said he told them.
Detectives had found him by following money. Amin said a mobile money transaction made with the phone of a woman who had been reported missing led them to the suspect. After the arrest, officers took him to his one-room house and laid out what they said they had recovered there: a machete they believed had been used to dismember some of the victims, 12 nylon sacks, gloves, ropes, women's underwear and a handbag, rolls of clear tape, a laptop, mobile phones and a cache of SIM cards and identity cards. A second man was arrested after being found with one of the victims' phones.
Early reports placed the arrest in Soweto or in Kayole, both on the east side of Nairobi, and they differ on the exact number of phones and SIM card holders police displayed.
Sources
- Kenyan man arrested, admits to killing 42 women, including his wife, UPI
- Kware Killings Prime Suspect Collins Khalisia Arrested in Kayole, Nairobi, Capital FM via allAfrica