Two guards were seriously injured when armed gangsters broke into the Nairobi Law Monthly offices in Nairobi. The gangsters stole computers and documents. The magazine was preparing to publish a 200 page publication on its first anniversary. The Nairobi Law Monthly publisher Ahmednasir Abdullahi yesterday said documents relating to major investigations, whose reports the magazine was scheduled to publish, were stolen. "The thugs took away lots of documents, computers and broke into writers and editors drawers.
The files they took relate to serious and bigger files than the Charterhouse Bank. This was not an ordinary attempt to rob the office because there are bigger offices on this building. This people deliberately attacked us. This phobia that certain powers that have over media should stop," Ahmednasir said.
The gangsters gained access to the guarded Mayfair Suites plaza in Parklands at about 1am by cutting the wrought iron fence and used ladders to scale the wall before entering the building through the windows. They pushed the CCTV cameras to avoid being captured on video before breaking into the office.
Two guards from the second floor who went to check the commotion downstairs were slashed with sharp objects and tied up with telephone cords. "We were compiling stories that others could not dare publish. We are now more determined than before to publish the stories. They thought that they will have disabled us by stealing our computers but we will reassemble the information and publish the magazine," said Ahmednasir.
All the other shops and offices in the building including a Samsung outlet on the ground floor were not attacked. Detectives from Parklands police station including a Scenes of Crime team visited the building. Nairobi Law Monthly lawyer Paul Muite scoofed at police investigations accusing them of complicity in the attack. He said that the break-in had hallmarks of a police operation and state attacks on media. "This has all the hallmarks of a police operation. This is a terrible deed and in my view without any doubt a police operation.
The implications to me are very great. One cannot obviously ask those who have done it to investigate themselves," Muite said. Imenti Central MP Gitobu Imanyara now wants the government to take responsibility for the Thursday night raid. Imanyara said that Ahmednasir and he were convinced that the raid is similar to the government’s 2006 attack of the Standard Group. “According to Ahmednasir, this was an operation similar to the March 2006 raid at the Standard Group which not other than the then minister for Internal Security John Michuki confessed was a government operation,” he said.
Addressing journalists at parliament building yesterday, Imanyara claimed that the next edition of the magazine was going to publish "an in-depth and comprehensive story on the operations of the Kenya Revenue Authority". He however said he was not trying to link the KRA in anyway to the raid but insisted the government out to come clean on the raid.
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