NAIROBI, Kenya, Jan 25 – The family of 20-year-old slain university student Rita Waeni has identified the head discovered in a dam in Kiambaa on Sunday as that of their daughter.
The family identified the severed head on Wednesday when they inspected the forehead, hair, and teeth.
The identification came when government pathologist Johansen Oduor was conducting a postmortem examination on the recovered head.
He is expected to issue his findings later in the day.
On Tuesday, homicide investigators from the Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) took over the murder investigation to undertake a forensic analysis of the head to determine the identity of the victim.
The dismembered body of Waeni was discovered at an apartment in Roysambu on January 14 after she was reported missing in a murder that has shocked the country.
Two Nigerian nationals, along with four Kenyans and an individual with a Mozambican passport are in custody in connection with the gruesome murder.
However, they have not yet been formally charged or asked to plead.
While the motive behind the murder remains unknown, the detectives believe that the perpetrators were professionals.
Her body was found in a dustbin hours after she had been killed in cold blood and a postmortem showed she had missing nails.
“This person who did all these also tried to clip off the fingernails for reasons which I might not be able to know but for us scientists, when we see fingernails clipped off, we think probably the person was trying to hide evidence so that we are unable to get his DNA from the victim,” government pathologist Oduor said after the exercise.
