A court has granted police time to hold the husband of a woman whose body was found hanging on a window in a suspected suicide in Nairobi’s Langata area.
This was after the detectives from the Homicide unit at the Directorate of Criminal Investigations said they had unearthed new clues into the death of the 27-year-old woman whose body was discovered on April 3, 2022.
In a fresh twist to the probe, forensic teams investigating the death of the mother of three found that CCTV footage in a building adjacent to the crime scene had been deleted.
The DCI detectives said Vanitah Nikesh’s husband Nikesh Harji Shanghani was arrested, in what seems to be a conspiracy to cover up her murder.
He was produced in court and police were allowed to hold him for 14 days as they investigate the incident.
But his lawyers have objected to the claims he was involved in the death of the woman.
The team led by director of homicide Martin Nyuguto visited the scene on Thursday and discovered that CCTV footage recorded on the day of the murder at an adjacent temple had been deleted, pointing to a likely conspiracy into the death of the woman.
According to the DCI, the deceased’s body was found by neighbours hanging at her house at the Swaminarayan Temple flats, along the Southern bypass, off Lang’ata Road.
Security guards manning the premises broke the door to the flat and found the deceased’s lifeless body hanging on a piece of clothing, as the woman’s two-month-old infant lay on an adjacent bed.
After noticing that the husband was not in the house, the witnesses notified the police at Lang’ata police station who processed the crime scene.
Despite all indications pointing towards a suicide case, neighbours said the marriage was marred with squabbles.
Preliminary investigations indicated that the woman had taken her own life.
This was after a postmortem conducted on her body indicated she committed suicide.
It also emerged that on the fateful morning, the deceased had handed their four-year-old son to her next-door neighbour and asked her to proceed with him to the temple before she joined them.
Even though the mother of three- a four-year-old boy and two-month-old twins- was on April 4, 2022, cremated according to the Hindu tradition, questions arose as to the circumstances surrounding her death.
But the new team from DCI said they could not rule out the possibility of foul play due to the position of the body.
Multiple witnesses indicated that the husband aged 32, had brought the deceased into the country from India, a few years ago after which they lived as husband and wife.
Some of her friends asked the DCI to investigate the case further hence the new developments.
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