Soldiers ‘joked about young mother’s brutal killing on Facebook’
A British soldier accused of brutally killing a young mother in Kenya joked about her death on Facebook with fellow squaddies.
Agnes Wanjiru’s stabbed body was found in 2012 dumped in a hotel septic tank after she was last seen entering a room with a British soldier.
the Army has been accused of covering up the killing while the soldier’s identity is said to have been an ‘open secret’ among troops in the Duke of Lancaster’s regiment for years.
this week the Ministry of Defence admitted it had not started an inquiry into the death despite a Kenyan judge ruling at an inquest in 2019 that the woman had been killed by a British soldier.
Now it has emerged that nine soldiers – including the suspected killer, known only as soldier X – took to Facebook in the years after to mock her death, according to the sunday times.
A member of the regiment posted two pictures from outside the Lions Court hotel bar in Nanyuki, near Mount Kenya, where the soldiers had been drinking and where Miss Wanjiru, 21, was last seen and later found dead.
the soldier tagged a number of colleagues in the post with the caption ‘if you know, you know’. several soldiers, at least one of whom is still with the regiment, replied to the post with one adding a ghost emoji to which another wrote the words ‘septic tank’.
in response, soldier X posted an emoji of an angel – often used in a tongue-in-cheek way to assert innocence – which prompted other soldiers to post ‘crying with laughter’ emojis.
sickeningly, this was followed by a cartoon image of a baby crying at a funeral from the tV show Family Guy – the victim was a single mother who left behind a fivemonth-old daughter.
soldier X was then asked if he ‘gets all choked up thinking about that place’ – a reference to the account he is said to have given colleagues that he accidentally choked Miss Wanjiru during sex. he replied: ‘Come to think of it, i have had a sore throat today.’
Approached at his home, soldier
X previously said the ‘rumours’ he was the killer were false and had been spread in a bullying campaign against him.
But when presented with the Facebook posts last week, soldier X declined to comment.
the revelations came as Boris Johnson is expected to come under pressure to act, with President Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya in the UK for the Cop26 climate change conference in Glasgow.
Last month, it was reported that five members of the regiment had confirmed soldier X’s name as the alleged killer.
One of whom – known as soldier Y – claims the suspect had rushed into the bar where troops were drinking on March 21, 2012, to confess to killing a prostitute.
soldier Y claims soldier X said ‘i’ve killed her’ before leading them to where he had dumped the body in the septic tank. soldier Y said he reported the incident at the time to senior officers but was told to ‘shut up’. he has since accused the regiment of ‘covering up’ the killing.
Even after the 2019 inquest, in which Judge Njeri thuku stated Miss Wanjiru was ‘murdered by British soldiers’ and ordered two criminal inquiries, no action was taken by the Army.
Labour defence spokesman John healey said it was ‘totally inadequate’ there had been ‘no investigative effort by the MoD’ in the past nine years.
A Kenyan diplomatic source in Nairobi said they believed the case was being ‘suppressed’ to protect relations between Britain and Kenya.
Defence secretary Ben Wallace said the MoD was not able to launch a parallel inquiry while the Kenyan one was going on, but that it was ‘fully supporting, and has always supported, the police with their ongoing investigation’.
A defence source said that the Facebook posts were being looked at and would be ‘dealt with appropriately’.
‘Cartoon image of a baby crying’