A Kilifi court has sentenced a 24-year-old paedophile to life imprisonment after finding him guilty of ten counts of defilement, child pornography, and trafficking in persons.
Principal Magistrate Ivy D. Wasike found Patrick Mbauni Muriithi guilty of sodomising two eleven-year-old male children and producing videos and photographs of the same using his mobile phone, offences he committed on diverse dates between August 1, 2022, and January 1, 2023.
Muriithi, who is also known as Pat Arc, Coaches, and Daddy, was also accused of recruiting, receiving, and harbouring the minors with a view to exploiting them sexually. He committed the offences at Mwembe Tayari in the Kisumu Ndogo area of Malindi town, Kilifi County, and Nyeri County.
On the counts of defilement and committing indecent acts on the minors, the magistrate sentenced Muriithi to life imprisonment, the minimum sentence prescribed by the Sexual Offences Act No. 3 of 2006.
Ms Wasike, who started listening to the case in Malindi before being transferred to Kilifi, fined the convict a total of Sh90 million or, in default, ordered him to serve a jail term of a total of 110 years on the other charges, but directed that the sentences run concurrently, meaning that Muriithi will only serve the life sentence.
The court heard that the convict used to coach a football team of under 15’s and that he used to recruit minors who were boys and offer them and some of their family members educational and financial support.
The court heard that the accused person used to live with some of the minors and that he used to sexually molest them and record the defilements/molestation using his mobile phone.
The prosecution called 15 witnesses, who included the two minors, their parents and friends, forensic experts, and police officers from the DCI and the Anti-Trafficking in Persons unit, as well as counsellors, among others.
The two minors, who were identified by initials, narrated how the convict recruited them to a football club and later requested their parents to live with him, and that is when he started molesting them sexually.
One of the boys narrated that whenever he resisted the indecent acts, the accused person would pull him, force him, or hit him with a green pipe to the extent of bleeding and also threaten to reduce his lunch allowance to Sh30 from Sh50.
He said the accused person, who committed the offence both in Malindi and his home in Nyeri County, used to say that he loved him, that he was sweet, and that he was the accused person’s wife.
“When committing the act, the accused person would put his phone on the bed, start recording the act, and when I asked him why, he would tell me to shut up as I was to do what I was asked to do and not question him,” the boy told the court during the trial.
Mr. Lawrence Okoth, an expert in forensic examinations from the Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) Headquarters, said his office received a cyber tip-off from Google that someone was uploading child pornography on Google Cloud and that they used the information and traced the accused person.
Medical reports on the two minors indicated that the boys’ anuses had scars on them, an indication that they had been injured.
In his defence, the accused person denied the charges, saying although he used to stay with the children in his house, he did not commit the said offences. He said he was also not aware that the minors had been defiled.
He also distanced himself from the pornographic materials on his phone, saying he used to leave the phone with the minors and that they could have used it to upload the offensive images and videos.
However, Ms. Wasike said after analysing the prosecution’s evidence and the defence, she was satisfied that the accused person committed the offences and directed a probation officer to file a report before sentencing him.
She said she was satisfied that the prosecution had proved beyond reasonable doubts the charges against the accused person and found Patrick Mbauni Mureithi guilty of two counts of defilement, four counts of child pornography, and four counts of trafficking in persons.
“From the evidence submitted by the prosecution, the accused person had pre-meditated the offences, calculated them, and planned them meticulously. The offence took place over a span of two years under the noses of the victim’s families and the community but went on undetected until it was flagged by Google Inc,” the magistrate noted.
She sentenced the accused person to life imprisonment for each of the two counts of defilement and fined him Sh10 million for each of the two counts of exposing minors to pornography or, in default, serving 15 years in jail.
She fined him Sh5 million for the two counts of being in possession of pornographic materials or in default serving 10 years in prison and Sh30 million for each of the two counts of trafficking in persons.
Ms. Wasike described the convict as a very dangerous sexual offender and said that should he be released after serving part of his sentence, the court releasing him should consider placing him under long-term supervision as provided for under the Sexual Offences Act.
By Emmanuel Masha
