Tragedy as another patient killed at Kenyatta Hospital ward, throat slashed

Detectives are investigating an incident in which another patient was killed inside a ward at Kenyatta National Hospital (KNH) in Nairobi.

The male patient was found dead in his bed with his throat cut, police and hospital officials confirmed.

The incident occurred in Ward Seven on Thursday, July 17.

Other patients told police and KNH officials that an intruder entered the ward and killed the patient. The motive for the latest incident is yet to be established.

Witnesses said the victim was a physically disabled man. One witness added that the man's throat had been slit.

Top police officers, led by Kilimani Police Commander Patricia Yegon and her DCI counterpart Hussein Mahat, spent most of Thursday afternoon at the scene as part of the murder investigation.

Mahat said the incident is being treated as a murder case. He added that no arrests had been made so far. There was no immediate comment from the hospital.

An official stated that the matter is under investigation and a statement will be issued later. Police are reviewing CCTV footage from the hospital to identify the killer.

This is the second such incident at the hospital this year, following one on February 7, 2025. In that case, Gilbert Kinyua Muthoni, 39, was found dead on a hospital bed with a slit throat.

Pathologists who conducted an autopsy on Kinyua’s body at the hospital mortuary said the wound was about three centimeters deep and caused his death.

His body also had blisters on the back, indicating that he had not been moved for a long time.

“He was supposed to be moved or turned every two hours, but the blisters on his back show he lay in the same position for a long time,” said one of the pathologists.

Homicide detectives say the case is still under active investigation. So far, the hospital has stated that there is no evidence the killer came from outside.

Detectives interrogated a patient who had been sharing the ward with Kinyua and collected swabs for DNA analysis.

The patient told them he could not recall anything from that night. Nurses and security personnel at KNH were also questioned, and police retrieved additional CCTV footage from the facility for analysis.

The hospital stated that all CCTV footage from Ward 7B had been provided to investigators. They noted that, for privacy reasons, no CCTV cameras are installed inside patient rooms, but cameras are placed in all alleys.

This latest incident comes nine years after a similar killing at the same hospital. In November 2015, Cosmas Mutunga Kenyatta, 42, was found brutally murdered in his hospital bed.

Mutunga had been admitted to Ward 8C on November 8 and was discovered dead with stab wounds and one of his eyes gouged out.

At the time, he was sharing the room with an incapacitated and deaf cancer patient. Three nurses were on duty the night the murder occurred.

The only witness was a 12-year-old patient who could neither hear, speak, nor write.

A postmortem report revealed that Mutunga had been severely beaten, his skull fractured, his eyes gouged out, and one leg shattered.

He was stabbed 42 times in what investigators described as a brutal and violent attack, exposing serious security lapses at the region’s largest referral hospital.

Mutunga, a father of four, was killed just hours after his family had visited him and days after they donated blood for his chemotherapy treatment.