Sixteen-year-old Mantoi Lekoloi Kaunda was grazing goats with her sister in northern Kenya when something terrible happened.
“I saw two white soldiers in army uniform a long way away. They started to come round behind us, towards me, so I ran away,” Mantoi’s sister Noldonyio Piro told ITV two decades ago.
“One chased me and hit me hard on the back of my head. I fell down and he stood on my arm and it snapped. He was sitting on my back. He was raping me. And then I passed out.”
The young woman added: “I didn’t see what happened to my sister. When I came round I was covered in blood. I screamed for my sister but she didn’t answer.
“When I found her she was lying with her eyes closed. I called her name and tried to wake her, but I couldn’t do anything.”
Mantoi was dead. She had been six months pregnant.
Her sister stumbled home to find their father, Kaunda Lekoloi, who recalled: “She was just shouting ‘problem, problem’, and I could see she was having trouble walking.
“She said the white men had attacked them, and then she was sick. I could see her arm was broken. I found Mantoi covered in blood. I could see that she was dead. There were two sets of soldiers’ boot prints in the dust.”
Mantoi was buried the very next morning. “This child of mine was good, I loved her,” Lekoloi lamented.
Cold case
Mantoi’s alleged rape and murder occurred around 1995 in Archers Post, a vast area used by hundreds of British soldiers every year for military exercises.
The family’s allegations only came to light a decade later, as part of a wider scandal that saw UK forces accused of raping thousands of Maasai and Samburu women.
Kenya’s CID launched an investigation and Nairobi’s chief magistrate, Aggrey Muchelule, ordered that Mantoi’s body be exhumed.
British forensic experts flew out to join Kenyan counterparts. In October 2004, they erected a white tent and strung yellow crime scene tape at the remote rural burial site.
For seven hours under the baking equatorial sun, the team of 20 paper-suited investigators dug down five feet deep until they found a sheet covering a corpse.
A DNA test confirmed it was Mantoi’s body and X-rays were then taken. ITV journalist Fiona Foster said “these revealed a single long clean break running the entire length of one side of her rib cage.”
Dr Moses Njue, a Kenyan government pathologist, told Foster: “The pattern of the fracture was like a force was applied at the back, a massive force was applied to the rib cage…My guess is it would be things like a boot.”
Few local people could afford such sophisticated shoes in rural Kenya at that time. Detective chief superintendent Gideon Kibunja, who led the Kenyan CID murder inquiry, remarked “The findings so far tend to agree with the claim by Mantoi’s sister that they were attacked by a British soldier”.
He reasoned: “The kind of boots that these officers put on – the kind of boots that are described – there’s a possibility the injuries could have been caused by that kind of boot.”
“We are treating this case as a case of murder, and of course we are also treating it as a case of rape.”
‘Foreign hair’
Potentially even more significant than the X-ray results or boot prints were DNA samples retrieved from the burial site. Kenyan forensic experts managed to remove a hair from the lower part of Mantoi’s body.
Pathologist Dr Njue said: “The hair which we got was contaminated with foreign hair. There is no better way of proving that this was rape than proving that somebody else’s pubic hair was in the pubis of Mantoi.”
The hair, which Njue linked to Mantoi’s attacker, was not believed to come from anyone in her tribe.
Instead, Detective Kibunja appealed: “We are hoping that with the help of the British authorities we might be able to get some DNA samples from soldiers who may have been doing their training practices in the general area at that time.
“With DNA assistance we might come to the bottom of this and possibly identify the killer, or killers if there are more than one.”
When ITV broadcast their interviews in March 2005, the British army’s Royal Military Police claimed to have not yet received such a request from Kenya’s CID.
Shortly after the exhumation, Mantoi’s remains were reburied and her father passed away consumed by “horror and shock”, Declassified has learnt.
And then the case went cold. Again.
Quest for justice
It’s now nearly 30 years on from Mantoi’s murder. Her surviving family has not heard from the police since the exhumation and is unaware of anyone ever having been convicted.
They were never shown the autopsy report, and cannot seek answers from Dr Njue – who went on to be the government’s chief pathologist – as he died in 2023.
When asked for an update on the case last week, the British military was unable to clarify whether troops had ever been DNA tested for matches with samples found on Mantoi’s body.
A spokesperson would only say: “The Service Police supported the investigation into the death of Mantoi Lekoloi Kaunda conducted by the Kenyan Police.”
Yet a glimmer of hope transpired this August when a small delegation of Kenyan human rights activists travelled to Archers Post to meet Mantoi’s sister. The team, composed of lawyer Kelvin Kubai and campaigner James Mwangi Macharia, believes the case has echoes of a more recent scandal.
In 2012, another Kenyan woman, Agnes Wanjiru, was found dead inside a hotel septic tank near a British army training camp. A coroner ruled that a British soldier was responsible for Wanjiru’s murder, but the suspect is still at large.
Wanjiru’s niece, Esther Njoki, is leading a campaign for justice that has drawn attention to a range of alleged abuses by British soldiers in post-colonial Kenya.
These include a fire sparked by squaddies that blighted the air and water for thousands of local farmers, and instances of unexploded bombs left behind after army exercises that have maimed or killed unsuspecting civilians.
Macharia’s group, the African Centre for Corrective and Preventive Action (ACCPA) is suing the British army over the fire damage. Together these abuses, many of them highlighted by Declassified, have prompted a Kenyan parliamentary committee to launch an inquiry into the British army’s activities.
Mantoi’s case may well be one they wish to explore. Her sister told Kubai and Macharia that their visit gave “renewed hope” of justice. Macharia said it was “devastating” to hear her story. “The scars of her broken hand are still visible,” he remarked. “I was lucky to escape alive,” Piro reflected.
Cover up
Given the international investigation that Mantoi’s murder had sparked by 2004, the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) must hold documents from the incident – and yet it seems unwilling to provide any assistance.
Declassified filed a Freedom of Information (FoI) request to the MoD asking for particular files from Mantoi’s case, including the pathology report and DNA results, as well as their correspondence with Kenyan police and courts around the exhumation.
Britain’s military, which has historically destroyed sensitive files from Kenya by using bonfires or dumping them in the ocean inside weighted crates, said it “can confirm that some information in scope of your request is held.”
However, the department claimed it would be too onerous to process the request. Under UK transparency laws, a civil servant should not have to spend more than three and half days looking for documents that have been requested.
Apparently, the MoD holds records of Mantoi’s case in “both electronic files and archive boxes” which would take “at least 14 days worth of effort” to search in what was a “very optimistic estimate”. The search “may take significantly longer”.
It stressed: “There is no easy way to delineate between relevant and not relevant information without manually reviewing the information held.”
Normally, civil servants would advise how an FoI request could be reworded to make it more focused. But in this case, Declassified was told “there is no refinement the MoD can suggest to bring this request under the cost limit.”
This excuse seems to violate Whitehall’s code of practice on FoI, which states: “Authorities should have appropriate tools to identify, locate and retrieve information when required. An effective search capability should be maintained”. Declassified has issued an appeal.
Kubai informed Mantoi’s sister of the bureaucratic chicanery being deployed by officials in Whitehall, yet she was undettered.
“She really appreciates that people are asking for the files. It gives her some hope that she may finally get closure,” he relayed to Declassified. “She is hopeful that she will at last be able to know the results of the autopsy and what transpired.”
Time may finally be working in the family’s favour. Under the Public Records Act, government departments must transfer their records to the National Archives “no later than 20 years after their creation.”
If the MoD believes it is too time consuming to review its files on Mantoi’s murder, then perhaps the public can inspect them instead.
Kenya’s Directorate of Criminal Investigations did not respond to a request for comment.
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