It took the intervention of a hawk-eyed MP to stop a spy pretending to be a mortuary attendant from stealing JM Kariuki’s body.
Kisumu Town MP Grace Onyango, who spotted the spy, was among legislators who had stormed the City Mortuary but were being prevented from seeing the body of their colleague.
The MPs had flocked the mortuary after, JM’s wives stormed Parliament and interrupted the reading of a government statement that the lawmaker was in Zambia.
A report by Standard reported that chaos erupted when the three women screamed that their husband’s body was at the city mortuary.
The spy, in a white coat, insisted that he was under strict orders not to allow anybody into the mortuary.
The Special Branch spy who normally operated in Parliament was in the process of releasing JM’s body to a group of women wailing outside the mortuary.
Mark Mwithaga, a close friend of JM Kariuki, testified that the government’s plan was to release the politician’s remains which had a tag on one of the legs: “A body of unclaimed Luo gangster”.
Mwithaga, former Nakuru MP, disclosed that JM’s killers had knocked off three of his lower teeth to justify the “unidentified Luo” tag.
“I do not know whether the women were Luo, but it was a cover-up waiting for the body,” Mwithaga told the Truth Justice and Reconciliation Commission in March, 2012.
Josiah Mwangi Kariuki was killed on March 2, 1975 and his mutilated body dumped at Ngong Forest.
In 1974, he was elected as Nyandarua’s member of parliament and became an assistant minister in the Kenyatta government between 1974 and 1975.