Sometime in 1996, Bernard Matheri Thuo alias ‘Rasta’ gave his new girlfriend an AK47 as a gift because he thought chocolate and flowers had become too common. The gift was not a surprise for a man of Rasta’s stature in crime.
Rasta loved guns. He lived, loved and killed by them. A renown sharpshooter, he was said to have honed his shooting skills by having scampering chicken and human beings as targets for practice. In August 1995, the police named him alongside Antony Ngugi Kanagi, alias Wacucu, and Gerald Wambugu Munyeria, alias Wanugu, as top criminals.
A Sh100,000 price tag was placed on their heads. When a special squad identified as Alpha Romeo was formed on January 1, 1996, to hunt down the trio, it took the elite unit only three days to nail Wacucu. Six months later on June 27, 1996, David Seronei — codenamed Alpha Two — gunned down the feared Wanugu in Nakuru’s Kabatini Shopping Centre. However, Rasta remained elusive, taking the police more than a year to gun down.
His killing in September 1997 ended the reign of a criminal the police described as a good schemer and planner, slightly different from his much-feared predecessors Wanugu and Wacucu, who were said to be violent.
Interviews with members of the unit that hunted him down say Rasta’s criminal activities lasted long because of one item he clearly took extra care of — rogue cops. He paid them handsomely even for worthless piece of information such as officer X was bedding officer Y. “He knew every step. He was always ahead of us,” recalls Seronei, who shot him down. The list of officers in Rasta’s payroll ranged from junior to senior police officers at Kiria-ini Police Station, which had a short-cut route to his estate located near River Thuruthuru. Seronei was the head of Alpha Romeo, a small and noble elite unit in the Criminal Investigations Department (CID) made up of the best from the dreaded Flying Squad formed on January 1, 1996, to kill Kenya’s most wanted criminals.
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