NAIROBI, Kenya, Jul 14 – Former Kenya Defence Forces (KDF) officer Major Peter Mugure has been sentenced to life imprisonment for the 2019 murders of his estranged wife and their two young children, ending nearly seven years of criminal proceedings in one of Kenya’s most shocking family murder cases.

📻 Breaking It Down

Delivering the sentence on Tuesday, High Court Judge Martin Muya described the killings as “barbaric” and ruled that the gravity and calculated nature of the crime warranted life imprisonment.

“I find that the acts committed were barbaric. Bearing in mind that the accused has been in custody, I sentence him to life imprisonment,” Justice Muya ruled.

The court noted that Mugure had spent several years in remand custody awaiting the conclusion of his trial but found that the brutality of the offences far outweighed any mitigating factors presented by the defence.

📌 What You Need to Know

Mugure, who was convicted of murdering his estranged wife, Joyce Syombua, 31, and their two children aged ten and five, told the court he disagreed with the verdict. The judge informed him of his constitutional right to appeal.

The case dates back to October 25, 2019, when Syombua and the two children travelled from Nairobi to visit Mugure at the Laikipia Air Base in Nanyuki before mysteriously disappearing.

Three weeks later, detectives from the Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) recovered their bodies from a shallow grave at a cemetery in Thingithu, near the military installation.

Investigators said the victims’ bodies had been stacked on top of one another before being hastily buried.

Mugure had been arrested on November 15, 2019, a day before the bodies were discovered.

A breakthrough came after Collins Pamba, then a 21-year-old employee at the senior officers’ mess at the air base, led detectives to the burial site.

📰 Source: Capital FM Kenya