At the time of the Rwandan genocide, Kabuga was Rwanda’s richest man and one of the financiers of the genocide. His trail went cold once he entered Kenya.
He was alleged to have received a false identity as Sadiki Nzakobi, a military man, treated in military hospitals and given round-the-clock military protection.
William Munuhe, a Kenyan journalist was killed when he tried to lead Rwandan fugitive Felicien Kabuga to a trap in his home.
The closest anyone had ever come to catching Kabuga before that January in 2003 was six years prior, in 1997, and at least once in August 1994. In the 1997 raid, all Kenyan police found in the townhouse where Kabuga had been hiding was a note from one of them warning Kabuga of the ambush. Then in 2002, Munuhe said he had met Kabuga, and he was willing to help the many police agencies looking for him catch him.
In the years before, Munuhe had worked for The Star, and then for The People Daily as a freelancer. At 27, he had weaved his way through the complex underworld of government tenders. The house he would be found in, where he had lived for a while, was in Karen.
A letter his family found in his pants, written in late December 2002, detailed an earlier kidnapping. The 27-year-old former journalist had been abducted from the Safari Park Hotel and driven for four hours in the boot of a car. He was then taken to a room, beaten and interrogated. Later he was taken into a room where he met Kabuga and three men who told him that they had recordings of his sit-downs with an FBI handler only known as “Mr. Scott.”
The house where US embassy informant, William Munuhe, was found dead after a botched operation to catch Felicien Kabuga who is wanted for war crimes for his role in the Rwandan genocide. (Photo by Evelyn Hockstein/MCT/MCT via Getty Images)
The month before he wrote the letter, Munuhe had written another to powerful Moi-era PS Zakayo Cheruiyot telling him he had spoken to Kabuga. The CID then summoned Munuhe, and within weeks Kabuga abducted him. Munuhe told the FBI he could bring Kabuga to them, so they set up a trap only they were a few hours too late.
A few hours after Munuhe died on January 15th, Kenyan and American police lay in wait outside his house waiting for the Rwandan to arrive. They gave up after six hours and left, unknowingly leaving the corpse of their contact inside the house. When he still didn’t show up two days later, they broke into his house.
William Munuhe Gichuki’s body was found in his bed on January 17th, 2003. He had been shot once in the head and there was a jiko next to his bed. His face was disfigured, most likely postmortem, with acid. He had been dead at least two days.