A somali American wants a court to compel famous Eastleigh-based crime buster Ahmed Rashid to pay him Sh10 million in compensation for breaking his leg and ruining his business.
In a petition filed at Kakemega law courts, Ali Ahmed Ally complains that Rashid and another officer, Laban Ali, harassed him while he stayed and did business in Eastleigh, Nairobi, extorting cash from him and visiting violence upon him until they ran him out of town.
According to court papers, Ally came to the country in 2016 and set up a night life business in Eastleigh. The club was called Fusion Shisha Lounge. He also had matatu business in the area.
He says the two officers would later know him as a foreigner with Somali roots. They would demand a protection fee from him, initially Sh15,000 per week but this graduated to Sh5,000 per day. The petitioner says he declined.
The papers show that Rashid would escalate the pressure and harassment, visiting Ally’s club repeatedly to “harass the petitioner’s customers and disrupt business at the petitioner’s club.” He then complained to the Pangani OCS about the harassment and extortion. No action was taken.
On October 1, 2017, Rashid would arrest Ally on charges of common assault, and booked him at Pangani Police Station, under OB/15/1/10/2017. Ally was allegedly assaulted while in custody by the accused officer, threatening to kill him, the petition claims.
He was released the following day on a police bond of Sh5,000 and was never charged in any court, but the threats and harassment continued.
When the government banned shisha on December 28, 2017, Rashid read it as a green light to double down on the harassment. The very night the ban was announced, Ally alleges in the court papers that Rashid stormed his club “without a search warrant, and seized a substantial portion of the assets of the club, valued at approximately Sh1.3 million”
“The police, and specifically the 1st respondent, took the petitioner’s assets to Pangani police station where they were detained ad infinitum.”
The petitioner would challenge the ban in court in January 2018. But of more significance is his petition that sought to have Rashid and other cops compelled to return his property and compensate him.
The court ruled on February 12, 2018 in his favour to have Pangani police station release the equipment and the individual officers involved be held personally liable for the needed compensation. But that was just it, an order on a piece of paper. No needle moved.
He claims he learnt through reliable channels that Rashid “had illegally given the seized goods to his business rival "and a close associate of the 1st respondent.”
“In any event, more than three years later, the seized goods have never been returned to the petitioner—a teaching example of brazen impunity.”
The harassment by the cops only increased.
As a mitigation, Ally wrote to any office he hoped to get help from, including the police IG, Ipoa, OCS Pangani police station, the KNCHR and received no response or help. The Attorney General’s office also wrote to OCS Pangani asking that Ally’s property be returned to him. This was also promptly ignored.
He resorted to airing his grievances in social media, exposing even more of alleged misdeeds and impunity of Rashid and the Pangani police, angering the officer even more.
On the night of September 23, 2018, the two sued officers with others broke into his house at about 11pm, arrested him and then took him "around the city with a plastic bag over his head”.
“The 1st and 2nd respondents then drove the petitioner to Tosha Petro Station on Juja Road, where the 1st and 2nd respondents, together with their men, battered the petitioner, held a gun to his head, threatened him with a long knife (panga), and threatened to kill him,” the papers read.
“The petitioner was physically assaulted with an electrical wire that caused a burn on his right hand, forced to drink urine, had his face covered with plastic bag, and threatened by a pistol on his forehead. The petitioner was brutally beaten up, kicked, punched, slapped, and whipped by an electrical wire and sticks.”
Rashid would allegedly confiscate his US passport and threatened to kill him if he did not drop his complaints against him. They charged him at Makadara law courts with trading in fake Kenyan currencies, and being in the country illegally. The court detained him for 14 days and later released him on a Sh100,000 bond.
At the height of the back and forth and Ally's sustained social media posting about his woes, he claims, the officers mobbed him one day at 1am while he alighted from a taxi at his gate and beat him up, breaking his leg and warning him that they would kill him and dump his body in a forest.
"On February 24, 2019 at approximately one o’clock in the morning, the petitioner was alighting from a taxi at his gate in Ushirika Estate, in Eastleigh, when a police car suddenly pulled up. The 1st and 2nd Respondents in the company of their associate, jumped out the police car and violently attacked the Petitioner.... brutally assault[ing him], and badly injured him."
"[They] broke the Petitioner’s leg. They threatened the Petitioner that they would kill him if the Petitioner did not stop filing complaints against them. The 1 st and 2nd Respondents threatened to kill and dump the body of the Petitioner in a deep forest where no one would ever find the Petitioner."
"The 1st and 2nd respondents made it abundantly clear that they were tracking the Petitioner’s phone via GPS, and that they had circulated his picture to “authorities” to be tracked and followed
For all the injustices, the petitioner wants court to declare that his rights were violated and be compensated Sh10 million.
Fearing for his life and lacking a passport, Ally fled Kenya and went to Tanzania. While in Dar es Salaam, he visited the United States Embassy and obtained a replacement passport.
