‘President’s Abduction Remark Not A Confession!’ – CS Murkomen Claims
Interior Cabinet Secretary Kipchumba Murkomen has spoken out to explain remarks made by his boss, President William Ruto.
Ruto said that ‘all abducted Kenyans had been restored with their families’, raising worries about government participation in the 2024 disappearances.
President Ruto says all Kenyans who had been abducted have been reunited with their families, assures Kenyans it will never happen again pic.twitter.com/eYbAUehy17
— Citizen TV Kenya (@citizentvkenya) May 12, 2025
On Citizen TV’s JKLive Show on Wednesday, the CS denied that the government was involved in the abductions during last year’s Gen Z protests.
Murkomen argued that Ruto only erred in using the term ‘abductions’ because he was referring to reported occurrences.
Murkomen contended that the President used the term ‘abduction’ to indicate that he was aware of the reports, but not necessarily because the government was engaged.
This is because the appropriate terminology would have been ‘missing persons.’
He emphasized that abductions can only be determined through investigations.
He stated that despite reports of over 100 people supposedly disappearing in 2024 alone, they may only be classified as ‘missing persons’ rather than ‘abductees’.
This is because inquiries have yielded no conclusive evidence supporting the latter.
“The real technical word to be used for abductions is missing persons, because in the first instance of reporting, nobody goes and says that so and so has been abducted because abduction is when you now find the person culpable,” he said.
“It’s just like when you find someone dead, you say someone has been killed, but you will only establish by law whether it is murder or manslaughter once you go through the court process.”
“The President could not have lied to the public because the truth is that there are reports of missing persons, and in the last seven years, there have been about 700 missing persons reported,” he added.
The president was taken out of context – Murkomen defends Ruto's remarks on abductions pic.twitter.com/A4u1TTFc8o
— Kenyans.co.ke (@Kenyans) May 14, 2025
“Last year alone, there were 123, and this year, about 13 people are reported missing.”
CS Murkomen went on to say that having a generic figure stating that 123 persons are missing in 2024 does not necessarily imply that they have been abducted.
He claims that others over the same time period could have fled their homes or traveled to other countries unexpectedly.
“We do not have the numbers because we cannot really say they were abducted because even cases of missing persons that are particularly related to just the protests are not conclusive,” he noted.
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“But we know that there are cases of people who are still searching for their loved ones; some attributing to the Gen Z and others is generally within that period of time, within the statistics of 123 missing people.”
President Ruto on Monday assured the country that all Kenyans reported missing under suspicious circumstances had been safely reunited with their families.
He also emphasised that his administration’s commitment to preventing enforced disappearances.
The sentiments raised concerns with Kenyans wondering whether they were an admission of guilt.
‘President’s Abduction Remark Not A Confession!’ – CS Murkomen Claims
