Kenyan court orders suspected serial killer to be held for 30 days

A Kenyan court on Tuesday ordered a man who police said has confessed to murdering and dismembering 42 women to be detained for 30 days as they pursue their investigations.

Collins Jumaisi Khalusha, 33, described by police as a "vampire, a psychopath", was arrested in the early hours of Monday following the horrific discovery of mutilated bodies in a Nairobi garbage dump.

He appeared in a court in the Kenyan capital where the magistrate approved a police request for him to be held for 30 days to enable them to complete their probe.

Since Friday, 10 butchered female bodies trussed up in plastic bags have been hauled from the site of an abandoned quarry in the Nairobi slum of Mukuru, according to the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights.

The head of the Directorate of Criminal Investigations, Mohamed Amin, said Monday that Kalusha had confessed to murdering 42 women over a two-year period from 2022, and that his wife had been his first victim.

The DCI said in a statement Tuesday that investigators were holding another two "persons of interest", one of whom was allegedly found with the phone of one of the victims.

- Caught 'luring another victim' -

Kalusha was detained in the early hours of Monday near a bar where he had been watching the Euro 2024 football match, after officers analysed the phone of one of his alleged victims.

As officers swooped in, "he was in the process of luring another victim", Amin told reporters.

"We are dealing with a vampire, a psychopath," Amin said.

The grisly discoveries were made just 100 metres (yards) from a police station and the officers there have been transferred to ensure an unbiased investigation, acting national police chief Douglas Kanja said on Monday.

The area -- including Kalusha's home, also about 100 metres from where the bodies were found -- will remain "active crime scenes", Amin said.

The dumped bodies have thrown a spotlight on Kenyan police and added more pressure on President William Ruto, who is already confronting a crisis over protests that saw dozens of demonstrators killed and officers accused of using excessive force.

The state-funded KNCHR said it was carrying out its own investigations into the Mukuru case because "there is a need to rule out any possibility of extrajudicial killings".

Amnesty International said it had been directly involved in the retrieval of some of the bodies and had sent independent pathologists to attend postmortems of the victims.

"While it is the case that a multiple homicide crime has taken place, only completing these autopsies will confirm the ongoing investigation into the perpetrator of these murders," Irungu Houghton, executive director of Amnesty's Kenya branch, told AFP.

Kenya's police watchdog, the Independent Police Oversight Authority, had also said Friday it was looking into whether there was any police involvement or a "failure to act to prevent" the killings.

Tensions had run high at the crime scene over the weekend, as volunteers combed through the vast piles of rubbish in search of more victims with officers briefly firing tear gas to disperse the crowds.

Kenyan police are often accused by rights groups of carrying out unlawful killings or running hit squads, but few have faced justice.