Law Society of Kenya (LSK) President Charles Kanjama, flanked by members of the LSK Council
Two lawyers dead within 48 hours, a nationwide march called for Friday (tomorrow), and a profession asking who is next
By MKT Reporter
The Law Society of Kenya has demanded urgent security guarantees for advocates after two lawyers died within 48 hours of each other, LSK President Charles Kanjama said yesterday. Advocate Esther Wairimu Keige, manager of legal services at the Kenya Forest Service, was found dead on Monday night, nearly a month after she went missing in Juja. Advocate Edward Muthee Kariuki was found murdered outside his Athi River home on July 5, days before Keige’s body was discovered.
Kanjama, flanked by members of the LSK Council, addressed the press at the society’s offices in South C, Nairobi, announcing that lawyers nationwide will hold a peaceful march tomorrow in honour of the two advocates. “The Law Society of Kenya has received confirmation of the death of our colleague, Advocate Esther Wairimu Keige, after weeks of anxious searching and fervent hope that she would be found alive,” Kanjama said. He described Keige’s death as coming “an agonisingly brief forty-eight hours” after the legal fraternity was thrown into mourning by Kariuki’s killing.
Keige, 54, had been missing for nearly a month before her family confirmed on Tuesday that she had been found dead. Police have not yet disclosed where her body was found or the circumstances of her death. Kariuki, who practised under the firm Edward Kariuki Law Advocates on Kiambu Road, was discovered outside his Athi River residence on July 5 by a security guard, after failing to return home two days earlier. Police said he had a visible cut above his right eye and a deep wound to the back of his head, believed to have been inflicted with a sharp object.
The Society said the two deaths, coming within a single week, could not be treated as an unfortunate coincidence. “An attack on an advocate is an attack on the administration of justice itself,” Kanjama said, describing the killings as a direct assault on the legal profession, the administration of justice and the rule of law.
LSK has called for the immediate formation of a multi-agency investigative team, involving the Directorate of Criminal Investigations and the Internal Affairs Unit, to establish whether the two cases are connected. Because Keige’s work involved forest conservation, land and environmental disputes at a public institution frequently entangled in questions over land, the Society has demanded a comprehensive forensic audit of all active land acquisition, leasing and alienation files handled by the Kenya Forest Service’s legal department over the past 12 months, to determine whether corporate or political interests were connected to her death.
The Society also wants immediate security interventions for advocates serving in public institutions and regulatory bodies, who it says are increasingly exposed to threats from criminal syndicates and corrupt networks while defending public assets. “The Executive must immediately provide institutional security and protective coverage for all advocates serving in public regulatory bodies who face illicit pressure and structural threats while defending public assets from corruption,” the Society said in its statement. It further demanded a transparent mechanism through which the DCI, the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions and other state agencies provide regular updates on investigations, arrests and prosecutions arising from both cases.
Friday’s march will begin at the Milimani Law Courts, where advocates are expected to assemble from 9am before proceeding to the National Police Service headquarters, where the Society plans to hand a petition to the Inspector-General of Police demanding action on advocates’ safety and speedy investigations into the two murders. Participants have been asked to wear formal attire and purple ribbons in a show of unity and remembrance. Similar marches are planned in LSK’s regional branches across the country, under the leadership of local officials. Kanjama has appealed to other Kenyans, including civil society groups, to join the march as a statement that violence against officers of the court has no place in a constitutional democracy.
The killings of Keige and Kariuki are the latest in a troubling pattern that has unsettled Kenya’s legal community over the past year. In September 2025, lawyer Mathew Kyalo Mbobu was shot dead in a drive-by attack along Lang’ata Road. In April this year, advocate Tom Ouya Imbukwa died in intensive care at Kenyatta National Hospital after being found badly assaulted at a Nairobi estate, having reportedly told colleagues he had received threats from a police officer weeks earlier. Each case prompted the same demands from LSK for swift, impartial investigations; none has yet produced a public breakthrough or a named suspect.
That pattern is what now troubles the profession most. Advocates interviewed by the Society in recent days describe a growing unease about representing clients in disputes touching public land, corruption or politically sensitive matters, and a sense that the state has not moved quickly or transparently enough to reassure them that the law will protect those who uphold it. LSK’s Lawyer-Police Liaison Committee says it has been engaging both the Keige and Kariuki families directly and will continue pressing investigators for updates as the inquiries proceed. The Society has also urged members of the public with any information relevant to either case to come forward, assuring them that their safety and anonymity will be protected.
For a profession whose members are meant to be guarantors of due process, the killings of two colleagues in a single week have become something closer to a warning. Friday’s march is intended as both tribute and pressure: a public reminder that when advocates are threatened, harassed or killed for the work they do, the rule of law itself is placed in jeopardy. Kenya’s courts will continue to sit and its lawyers will continue to argue their cases, but the question the legal fraternity is now asking publicly, and insistently, is whether the state can guarantee that they will be safe to do so.
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