A Mombasa trader who was reported missing after entering Tanzania on Christmas Eve has been found.
Hamisi Madilo on Wednesday contacted his father by phone and said he was in a hospital in Temeke, Tanzania.
The father, Mohamed Mbetsa, said his 28-year-old son called him and asked for fare to return home.
“He sounded weak. He did not speak much and said he will explain everything when he gets home. He, however, said it is a long story,” an anxious Mbetsa said.
Family members are on the way to Lunga Lunga-Horohoro on the border of Kenya and Tanzania to receive him.
Haki Africa executive director Hussein Khalid, who is following the case, said Foreign Affairs CS Monica Juma intervened and requested Kenya’s ambassador to Tanzania Dan Kazungu to intervene.
“We were in contact with the ambassador who sent officers to the hospital where they found him. They made arrangements for his return and they put him on a bus to Mombasa,” said Khalid.
Madilo is expected to reach the Lunga Lunga border at around 1pm.
Khalid described Juma’s intervention as professional and attributed the tracing of Madilo to cooperation between the Kenyan and the Tanzanian authorities.
Madilo had gone to Dar es Salaam to buy clothes for sale.
His family said Kenyan Immigration officers cleared him at Lunga Lunga, but he was arrested on the Tanzanian side at Horohoro.
Madilo told his father and wife Zeitun Chimako that he was taken to Duga police Station.Chimako is eight months pregnant with their first child after the couple got married in March last year.
Madilo has been selling clothes since the time he was at the University of Nairobi, from where he graduated with a degree in Environment and Natural Resources in 2017.
He is an intern at the Base Titanium Company in Kwale.