A man on Thursday stabbed his two daughters to death in Mishomoroni, Mombasa county, after asking them to get into the house to eat mangoes.
Mr James Maina, 30, met his daughters playing outside their home in Mishomoroni, Mombasa county, Kenya, while their mother wasn’t around and he asked them to come in and eat mangoes.
Like any trusting child would, the girls, aged six and four, dashed indoors, looking forward to sharing the juicy fruits with their father.
But their 30-year-old father instead grabbed a knife from their cluttered, one-room house and attacked them.
He stabbed one in the chest and the other in the neck.
Rather than call for help, the father, who was reportedly drunk at the time, sat on a keg near where his bleeding daughters lay.
It wasn’t until a neighbour named Ms Lina Righa, who feeds the girls in the absence of their mother, called for them for lunch and they didn’t respond, that it was discovered something was amiss. Ms Lina sent her child to check on them but the child returned to tell her that the door was locked.
She narrated:
The children usually eat lunch at my house when their mother is not around but when I called them, neither responded. I sent my child to look for them. She told me their door was locked.
I went with her and knocked on the door. The children’s father did not respond, so we broke down the door. We found him sitting on a jerrican. He said he had killed the children.
Ms Righa, who is the couple’s landlady, said Mr Maina had spent the whole day indoors drinking.
The couple has been living here for four months and the woman has been having problems because of her husband’s drinking. She is the one who has been struggling to feed the family.
