Dumped in Masinga: How strangers rescued abducted Standard editor in dead of night

DCI officer at the scene where Standard Associate Editor Alex Kiprotich was abandoned in Kiangeni, Ekalakala Village near Masinga Dam, Machakos County on September 5, 2026. [Boniface Okendo, Standard]

At a thicket in the heart of nowhere, some thorny trees stand stiff and silent, their branches clawing into the unforgiving scorching sky as a few dried leaves crunch beneath just beside a murram road.

Across, a narrow path disappears behind a humble homestead. Beyond the shrubs, the vast waters of Masinga Dam shimmer in the distance.

It is an unlikely place to find a man who had spent hours in the hands of his abductors.

Yet this is where Standard Group Associate Editor Alex Kiprotich was abandoned in the dead of night on September 1 — alone, dejected and shaken, and apparently warned that he would be shot dead.

Just a few steps from the homestead of Onesmus Mutinda Muatha, the senior editor was left in darkness, in an isolated corner of Ekalakala location, Kiangeni village, just a few metres from Masinga Dam in Machakos County.

We find Mzee Mutinda on the murram road behind his compound accompanied by two other men. He slowly led us into the bush.

“This is where they dumped Kiprotich,” he said, pointing to the spot where Kiprotich had emerged from the darkness seeking help.

The silence made the discovery even more unsettling.

It was around 2.30 am.

Mutinda had been asleep when a desperate voice pierced the quiet of the night.

“Jirani! Jirani! Ni mimi, Alex. Help me!”

The call mirrored the editor’s account to the family that the abductors had told him, “we are taking you to your home in Baringo.” It appeared Kiprotich thought he had been abandoned in his village where people would be familiar with the name “Alex.”

Onesmus Mutinda and his wife Celestina Nzula who hosted Standard Group Associate Editor Alex Kiprotich in Ekalakala Village, Machakos County, on September 4, 2026. [Boniface Okendo, Standard]

Mutinda heard the cry about three times before forcing himself out of bed. When he emerged, he found a man standing beside his compound, just beyond the fence.

“Kiprotich told me thieves had dumped him there,” Mutinda recalled.

His first instinct was to get the stranger away from the exposed spot, fearing the men who had abandoned him could still be nearby.

“I told him, ‘Instead of us talking while you are there, go around and come to the side where you could be safer,’” he said.

The two men eventually met at an intersection where a feeder road meets the narrow path leading to Mutinda’s home.

Mutinda said he decided to approach Kiprotich from outside the compound before escorting him inside since he could be attacked by his pet dog.

Help at last

“The first thing that came to my mind was, let me help this man. Maybe they will come back for him while he is outside the compound.”

Inside the compound, seats were brought out and the two men sat near the doorway.

It was only then that Kiprotich began recounting the ordeal.

He said his phone and identification card had been taken. He had been handcuffed and blindfolded, with his jacket pulled over his face.

What troubled him physically was pain at the back of his neck, which he attributed to being forced to bend for a long time.

According to his driver, Geoffrey Kamau Njoroge, they had left Nairobi a few minutes before 7pm.

At the Gilgil weighbridge, where a notorious bottleneck forces vehicles into a single lane with no room to maneuver, a Subaru bearing registration number KDG 125E suddenly blocked their path. Armed men poured out of the vehicle, took Kiprotich and bangled him inside the other vehicle, drove forward a few meters and made a U-turn.

He would later be found the following day, September 2, at dawn by colleagues.

Dashboard camera footage installed in Kiprotich’s vehicle captured the scary moment when four men immediately surrounded his car and demanded that he step out.

The elderly man said Kiprotich did not initially know where he had been taken.He only knew that he had been abducted. It was Mutinda who began orienting him to his surroundings.

“This is Ekalakala, Kiangeni village, and Masinga Dam is nearby,” he told him.

Kiprotich then asked for a phone and began calling people at home and colleagues at work. One of the names Mutinda remembers hearing was Tom who happens to be the Group’s head of security.

For a family jolted from sleep by a stranger’s cries, the night unfolded with surprising calm.

Mutinda’s wife, Celestina Nzula, had also heard the the distress call. “I heard him calling,” she recalled, then asked her husband “who is calling outside?”

“He told me to wait and see.”

When she eventually stepped outside, she greeted the stranger.

“He told me he was Alex. I asked him where he had come from. He said he had come from far.”

Celestina then listened as Kiprotich narrated what had happened earlier.

“It was not easy to get out of bed, but I summoned the courage because I saw that he was a fellow human being like me, and I decided to help him,” Mutinda shared.

The family did not panic.

Mutinda’s wife and their two children, who had woken up, eventually returned to bed. Their other two children did not wake up.

Mutinda and Kiprotich spent the rest of the night outside in the cold, as the latter made calls and narrated what had happened.

But inside the house, Mutinda’s wife did not sleep until dawn, when Kiprotich’s colleagues arrived topick him.

“I could hear them talking, (Mzee and Alex.)

By morning, neighbours knew something unusual had happened. Not because Mutinda had raised an alarm. But because vehicles began arriving to take Kiprotich away. Until then, the dramatic episode had remained largely hidden inside the quiet homestead.

The location, however, raises disturbing questions.

The questions

Masinga Dam is only a short distance away — Mutinda estimates roughly 500 metres from the point where Kiprotich was abandoned, although the distance through the terrain varies.

After the interview, Mutinda walked us towards the dam.

From the homestead, the landscape opens gradually. Thorny bushes give way to a broader view of the water. The dam is vast. And the surrounding terrain is secluded.

“There are crocodiles, there are hippos. Sometimes they leave the water and wander towards the surrounding area.

His words add another unsettling dimension to the mystery.

Why was Kiprotich abandoned here?

Was the secluded thicket simply chosen because it offered a convenient hiding place?

Was the proximity to the dam accidental?

Or did his abductors deliberately choose a location from which a victim could disappear into a remote landscape?

Was the dam part of their plan to leave the victim there permanently?

Those questions now form part of the wider mystery surrounding Kiprotich’s ordeal. The thicket may hold clues to what happened to a man whose fate hung in the balance for more than five hours.

For Mutinda, however, the night has a much simpler meaning.

“I was simply helping out of sympathy for my fellow human being.”