Cruel quack free, elusive justice for victims

He sedated all his female patients irrespective of their condition, kept them in a room for as long as they were unconscious, and then later slapped them with bills listing all manner of procedures for which they had to pay.
What worries most of the patients who went through Mugo wa Wairimu’s hands, however, is that they may never know what happened between the time the sharp needle pricked their bodies and the time they regained consciousness.

CONSENT
To some, like Ms Anne Mwende, whose names we have changed for legal reasons and to protect her privacy, a pregnancy was terminated without her consent. She reported the matter to Kasarani Police Station three years ago but justice has never been served.
“My boyfriend took me to Mugo’s clinic at around 3pm some time in 2015, long before the media frenzy around the ‘doctor’,” says Ms Mwende. “I was only 21. Mugo said we needed to conduct an ultrasound on my four-month-old pregnancy. He said he needed to inject me with a drug before he examined me. I agreed.”

BLEEDING
What Ms Mwende did not know was that her boyfriend had asked Mugo to terminate the pregnancy. She was rendered unconscious and, when she woke up around 7pm, she lay in a strange room.
“My boyfriend was not there when I woke up,” she said. “I asked a woman who was standing next to me where I was and she told me not to move because I was bleeding. The bed was covered in my blood. I panicked. She told me that my boyfriend had stepped out to buy me an energy drink, then rushed out to call Mugo.”

ABORTED
A few minutes later, Mugo entered the room and casually informed her that a medical emergency had required him to abort the foetus.
“He said the baby had been lying in a dangerous position, and that had he not aborted the pregnancy, I would have died,” she said. “I did not believe him, and it immediately dawned on me that he had colluded with my boyfriend to terminate the pregnancy that my lover had rejected all along.”

PHONE OFF
Ms Mwende says that since she did not want to subject herself to more danger, she asked to be discharged. She was given some sanitary pads and some tablets, then told to put on her clothes and leave.
“When I arrived at my boyfriend’s house, I did not find him. The door was locked and I could tell that he had moved to another house. His phone was off,” she recounted.
She went to her house in Umoja before reporting the matter at the Kasarani Police Station the next day under OB number 23/18/3/2015.

ORDEAL
Another victim told our sister television station, NTV, of an almost similar ordeal. She said that, one Saturday afternoon in November 2014, she sought medical services at Mugo’s clinic for a recurrent bleeding.
“I saw a poster on the streets, called the number, and he invited me in,” she says.
She walked into what would soon turn out to be a trap with her then boyfriend, who chose to wait for her at the reception. The first man who attended to her did the scan and printed out the images before asking her to get into the next room, where Mugo waited patiently.

EXAMINATION
“He told me that results showed I had developed an abnormal growth, but would not get into details of the type, exact location, and nature of the growth. He insisted that I needed emergency surgery, scaring me in the process. I asked him to give me the printouts so I could seek a second opinion but he refused,” she said.
Mugo then changed tune and told her that he needed to conduct a physical examination of her pregnancy.
“He told me to open my mouth and placed three tablets under my tongue that immediately knocked me out. When I woke up, the bedsheets were soaked in blood and my boyfriend was screaming next to me. I did not have my undergarments on and, to date, I fear that I may have been sexually assaulted.”

HORRIFYING
Since her ordeal, she says she has attended all court hearings that have touched on the doctor since he was arrested. She even testified in court, but is yet to get the justice she so craves, or even know what happened to her.
Mugo was arrested in 2015, accused of raping patients inside his Prestige Clinic in Kasarani. A few days later, he was released by the courts pending the hearing. On Monday, NTV showed in horrifying detail how the quack had gone on to open another clinic in Kayole.

IDENTITY
Yesterday, residents of the neighbourhood told the Nation that Mugo operated a clinic named Ultrasound Centre at a residential flat near Choma Villas, but he was usually spotted transporting unconscious women to another facility named Millan Medical Centre.
“I cannot really tell what happens in that clinic, but I have always warned women against seeking medical help from Mugo,” said a woman who runs a business next to the clinic. We are not revealing her identity for security reasons.

THREATENS
The businesswoman said the doctor is well known for sedating women seeking medical help, even for conditions that do not need surgery or any other procedure.
Other women who did not want their identities revealed said they had on several occasions met Mugo on the road, and that every time they bumped into him, he invited them to his clinic, saying he would be alone.
“He is always drunk and has foul language,” one of the women said. “He threatens people, telling them he knows all corners of jail. He has dangerous people surrounding him and I fear they might hurt me.”

DETECTIVES
Yesterday, Director of Criminal Investigations George Kinoti sent a team of detectives to the clinic to investigate the activities of the quack.
The detectives, together with officials from the Kenya Medical Practitioners and Dentists’ Board, collected several drug samples and equipment and took them to the board’s offices in Hurlingham for inspection.
“We confiscated some medicines, both orals and injectables, and equipment from the clinic,” the board’s deputy chairperson, Alice Mutungi, said.

IGNORANCE
She added: “Some of the things we found should only be handled by qualified, registered and licensed medical practitioners, which the suspect isn’t.”
The board’s Chief Executive Officer Daniel Yumbya told the Daily Nation that cracking down on quacks had been hard because the public does not give information to the police, either because of fear or ignorance.
“It is also difficult to comb the estates without enforcement from the police,” he said, adding that he had requested the Inspector-General of Police to deploy some officers to the board.