Boarding school mass sex attack horror: How a mob of boys raped 71 girls in night of depravity with 19 victims killed in a stampede as they tried to escape their dormitory

Daily Mail​

5 days ago

Twilight was receding into night on July 13, 1991 when St. Kizito, a mixed boarding school in the Kenyan town of Meru, was plunged into darkness.
Outages and blackouts happened often at the establishment located roughly 50 kilometres from Mount Kenya, so for the staff and most of the students it appeared a day like any other.
But on this occasion, the power was cut deliberately.
Hundreds of girls, all aged between 14-18, slinked off back to their dormitories - a handful of single-storey brick buildings with tin roofs concealing simple metal bunk beds - as was customary when the lights went out.
A few hours later, 19 of them would be dead. Dozens more would be left with trauma that would haunt them forever.
The power cut on that day was the first step of a dastardly plan fuelled by teenage anger and spite.
The school's boys, who had been training weeks ahead of an interscholastic athletics competition, were left despondent when they discovered the school had not paid the fees necessary for the students to participate.
Enraged that all their hard work had come to nothing, they decided to organise a protest against the school's inaction, among other concerns, and refused to attend their classes.
They expected their 271 female classmates to follow suit, but the girls refused. This snub, as they saw it, was the straw that broke the camel's back.
The violence that followed - and the shocking dismissal of its severity by teachers and the courts - became a symbol of gender inequality and an example of violence against women that nearly 35 years on still occupies the nation's collective consciousness.
As night fell, a group of seething boys cut electricity and phone lines powering the school and connecting it to the outside world.
Then they began throwing stones, sticks and other missiles at the school buildings, including the girls' dormitories.
Fearing that her students would be more susceptible to violence if they were isolated from their friends in separate dorms, the head girl reportedly instructed all the female pupils to congregate in one dorm room and barricade the door.
But as the night went on, the boys became yet more feral and encircled the small brick outhouse.
The girls, crammed in between the beds, were only able to hold out for so long before the boys broke down the door and piled in.
The ensuing chaos proved fatal. By sunrise, 19 girls had lost their lives.
Investigations revealed they died in horrific circumstances after the boys bust into the dorms.
Several were trampled to death, having fallen amid a desperate scramble to escape before being crushed underfoot.
Others were suffocated when beds and mattresses fell on them as the boys forced them into a corner.
Massimo Ballottino, an administrator at Meru's Tigania Hospital where many of the girls ultimately received treatment, visited the scene and told reporters: 'I have never seen anything like it. It was like civil war. There were bodies everywhere.'
Many of those who did manage to escape faced another horrific ordeal.
A shocking total of 71 girls were found to have been raped that night, police said.
Local news reports at the time claimed that several boys had hidden their identity by wrapping bedsheets around themselves before chasing down the fleeing females with torches.
They pulled the girls into grassland bordering the schoolgrounds before assaulting them.
The incident triggered outrage among the public and the media, prompting then-president Daniel arap Moi to pay a visit to the community.
But the outrage only grew as journalists began to uncover the ambivalence and incompetence exhibited by school staff, guards, law enforcement and even the courts tasked with handling the shocking case.
Beyond the heinous actions of the teenage perpetrators, critics questioned why no teachers or guards attempted to intervene, given that many staff members would have been on site at the time of the riot.
It later emerged that security guards had fled their posts, and since the phone lines had been cut, they could not call police.
The first anybody beyond the school grounds heard of the chaos was at 2am on July 14, when a pair of guards who had run from the commotion woke local reverend Alexander Kiranja, who reportedly ran a mission nearby.
Kiranja then went to the nearest hospital and asked them to call the police. This delay meant the boys continued their rapes well into the night before anyone arrived to stop them.
Salome Mutua, a student of the school, told KTN News of the hellish scene inside the dormitory.
'We pushed all the beds to lock the entrances. Because we were scared of being pulled out by the boys to get raped. Some of us hid under beds, some were on top of beds, anything for safety...
'The beds were overwhelmed with weight and broke, so those underneath got injured badly. The bedframes had sharp edges, the girls got stabbed.
'The police did not show up until 6am... of course they heard the screams and I'm sure some teachers tried calling them but they did not show up.
'They could've saved us,' she said solemnly.
The day following the tragedy, The Kenya Times managed to get hold of the school's principal, James Laiboni.
His statement left readers utterly gobsmacked.
'In the past, the boys would scare the girls out of their dormitories and in the process they would get hold of them and drag them to the bush where they would 'do their thing' and the matter would end there, with the students going back to their respective dormitories,' he said in a tight-lipped statement.
In other words, rape was commonplace at the school, with teachers effectively condoning the practice.
Deputy principal, Joyce Kithira, was also quoted by the same publication as commenting: 'The boys never meant any harm against the girls, they just wanted to rape.'
Francis Machira Apollos, a probation officer who worked on the case and was interviewed by reporters in the aftermath of the attacks, made it clear that the school would never have shared details with authorities had girls not perished.
'If you are a girl, you take it and hope you don't get pregnant. If girls hadn't died in this, we wouldn't have known about it,' he told reporters.
A total of 39 boys were ultimately arrested on charges of murder and rape, but with prosecutors unable to tie any of them to the death of any one girl, the charges were reduced to manslaughter.
The trial lasted a year, and eventually only 10 of the 39 boys were jailed - but their identities were concealed from the public.