Booker Omole Remains Imprisoned After Torture

Kenyan Communist Leader Has Been Transferred to Kitengela Remand Prison

Booker Ngesa Omole. Photo credit: Deena Stryker

Over a day and a half after his abduction and custodial torture, Booker Ngesa Omole, general secretary of Communist Party Marxist-Kenya (CPM-K), was presented in court on 26 February, with a crudely bandaged, injured arm.

​Denying bail on a technicality, the Mavoko Law Court in Machakos town adjourned, scheduling the next hearing for 9 March. In the meantime, Omole has been transferred to Kitengela Remand Prison, notorious for its overcrowded, unsanitary conditions.​

Despite a “broken arm,” the court has denied him “urgent medical care,” CPM-K said in a statement, protesting: “This is not justice. This is political persecution.”​

“We are revolutionaries. We will obviously defend ourselves if attacked”

The police have charged him with assault on their officers. Omole maintains, however, that he was not aware that the men in civilian clothes, grabbing him on the night of 24 February without identifying themselves, were police.​

“We are revolutionaries. We will obviously defend ourselves if attacked,” remarked CPM-K’s chairperson, Mwaivu Kaluka. In the altercation that followed, the police injured Omole’s arm, slit his fingers with knives, and damaged his jaw and teeth, said the CPM-K.​

“The police also claim that he drew a weapon on them,” said the Nairobi-based journalist and Sovereign Media editor, Ahmed Kaballo, who has read the chargesheet. “In Kenyan law, you are allowed to use a firearm in self-defense if you are being kidnapped,” which was Omole’s impression given the absence of police uniforms or identification, Kaballo noted.​

A survivor of an assassination attempt last year, Omole legally carries a registered firearm. It was in his car at the time when he was stopped by unidentified men on his way back home from Isiolo, where he was travelling as part of a media project to understand and document the working conditions and wages in the county, Kaluka told Peoples Dispatch. Brutalizing Omole and bundling him up into his car they impounded, the police drove him to his residence in Nairobi, where he was headed anyway, he added.​

Overthrowing a government with 2,500 dollars?

On allegedly finding cash equivalent to about USD 2,500 in his apartment, “they started beating him, and accusing him of trying to overthrow the government, which is ridiculous because no government can be overthrown with 2,500 dollars,” added Kaballo.​

From his apartment, he was driven to the industrial outskirts of Nairobi to the Mlolongo town’s police station, which CPM-K described as a notorious site of extrajudicial killings. He was not allowed to meet his lawyer until the next day, when Omole spoke through his lawyer’s phone to Sovereign Media.​

He said the police “tortured me… to extract information” about the party and its activities. “Even now, I am being held in an isolated cell… no water, no food, my comrades have not been allowed to see me,” he added, stressing his need for “some medical attention and at least some food.”​

During the torture, Kaballo told Peoples Dispatch, police accused Omole of being “the head of a narco trafficking gang”, asking why else would he “protest outside the US embassy on behalf of a drug dealer,” referring to Venezuela’s president, Nicholas Maduro. ​

The US, which fabricated a story about Maduro heading a non-existent drug cartel in the lead up to his illegal abduction on 3 January, quietly let the accusation slip, excluding it from the charges it levelled against him in a district court of New York, which had no jurisdiction.​

Nevertheless, the Kenyan police used this US fabrication about a South American President to torture a communist leader in an East African country. “Linking Booker to a ‘drug cartel’ is pure political theater,” CPM-K retorted. “His only link to Venezuela is solidarity with Nicolás Maduro. Internationalism is not narcotics. Anti-imperialism is not a crime. When the state lacks evidence, it manufactures lies.”​

“We have seen this script before”​

Such accusations only “expose the desperation of a comprador state acting as an enforcer for US imperialism on African soil. That a Kenyan citizen can be persecuted for exercising the sovereign right to protest at a foreign embassy, demanding the release of a democratically elected head of state kidnapped by the United States, tells us everything about who truly governs in Nairobi and in whose interest,” said Pan Africanism Today in a solidarity statement.

​“We have seen this script before. Wherever the organized people dare to challenge imperialism and its local agents, the response is the same: criminalization, fabrication, and brute force. The persecution of Comrade Booker is not an isolated incident – it is part of a continental and global pattern of repression against those who refuse to kneel.”

​The police, however, did not mention narco trafficking or his supposed plot to overthrow the government with 2,500 dollars in the chargesheet. The charge wouldn’t stick in the court. They instead charged him with possession of narcotics, claiming to have found marijuana in his car.​

This was an essential charge for the police to make any case, because the other charges of assaulting police officers and the drawing of his firearm pertained to what unfolded in the course of his arrest, explained Kaballo.​

“But the police had to explain why they went to arrest him in the first place. So they said, they went to attend a noise complaint on an Airbnb” residence where Omole was staying in Isiolo. “Plainclothed police officers wouldn’t go for a noise complaint,” Kaballo remarked.​

From the CIA’s playbook​

Nonetheless, the police maintain they did, whereupon Omole allegedly assaulted them and drew a weapon. After subduing him, they claimed to have found marijuana. Charging him with narcotics is straight out of the CIA playbook, which has been “using the pretext of drugs in Colombia and Venezuela to silence leftist voices,” the CPM-K maintains.​

While his lawyer was informed of the assault charge when he managed to pay a visit to Omole at the Mlolongo police station on 25 February, the charge of cannabis possession was revealed only after the police provided the chargesheet on presenting him in court on the afternoon of 26 February.​

Kaballo, who was at the court since morning, said he “saw many accused being brought into the courtroom. They were all escorted by one or two police officers. But when Omole was brought in around 2 in the afternoon, he was surrounded by six or seven police officers. Two others were blocking the door. So I couldn’t go in. None of the party members” could get in either, he added. The police took all measures to ensure that Omole could not see any expression of solidarity by his comrades. ​

The bandaging on his hand was “amateur”, Kaballo recalled. “It did not look like it was done by a medical professional.” Injuries notwithstanding, the judge denied him bail “on the technicality that the court needs the pre-bail hearing document, which makes no sense because it is a document the police have to provide.”​

The court adjourned till 9 March, sending Omole to Kitengela Remand Prison in the meantime. “The father of the cameraman who was with me at the court died in that prison, awaiting trial,” Kaballo said, pointing to its overcrowded, unsanitary conditions.​

“Our comrade’s health continues to deteriorate, and he has not received medical attention.”​

“The Kenyan state is known for its willingness to commit acts of brutality, and we have no doubt that it is willing to let Comrade Omale die in custody from his injuries. The international community must act now to prevent another state murder disguised as “detention”,” the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) said in a solidarity statement.​

“Our comrade’s health continues to deteriorate, and he has not received medical attention,” the CPM-K raised an alarm.

​Nonetheless, “Booker is … courageous,” said the Friends of Socialist China, describing him as an “inspirational and principled leader of the Kenyan working class … a prominent fighter in the ranks of the international communist and anti-imperialist movements … This strikes fear into the hearts of the puppet regime in Nairobi and its masters in London and Washington. Their attack on Comrade Booker is a sign of weakness, not strength.”

A cross-continental solidarity​

Solidarity statements for Omole continue to arrive from across the world, including from Sudan, in the midst of the world’s worst humanitarian crisis and famine caused by a war. “Denouncing the repeated unlawful abductions and other forms of flagrant violations of the rights of Comrade Booker and other members of his party,” the Sudanese Communist Party (SCP) also declared its solidarity.

​The International Peoples’ Assembly (IPA), comprised of 200-odd organizations across the world – including trade unions, peasants’ organizations, and left parties – declared: the “peoples’ movements of the world stand with Kenya, condemning the abduction, torture, and politically motivated prosecution of Booker Ngesa Omole”.

“The struggle for dignity, land, bread, and sovereignty cannot be crushed by batons, prison walls, or fabricated charges. When the state negates justice and serves imperial interests, it exposes itself as a puppet of forces that fear the organized power of the people.”

“History teaches us that repression is the last refuge of a fearful ruling elite,” added the Tanzania Socialist Forum. “Threats, intimidation, arbitrary detention, and torture cannot silence the spinning wheel of revolutionary change.”