It has now emerged that victims of enforced disappearance are reluctant to speak about their ordeals once they are back.
They refuse to talk about their experiences while in the hands of their captors and only give general snippets, but not details.
From Muslim scholar Abdiwahab Sheikh Abdisamad to Lamu businessman Taimur Kariuki Hussein and even lawyer Hassan Nandwa, the trend is the same: they go missing, resurface and then keep silent.
Human rights activist say the victims of enforced disappearances go through torture and threats which they are made to believe would end their lives if they talk.
HAKI Africa executive director Hussein Khalid, a regular voice against enforced disappearances, told the Star that the practice was becoming a notorious practice by security agents.
This is done under the guise of conducting counter-terrorism investigations.
Abdisamad, for example, got abducted on September 8 and freed 12 days later but has remained cagey about his ordeal, saying that he did not want to jeopardise his safety and that of his family.
At some point, in a meeting with human rights groups at Jamia mosque in Nairobi, he said he would be more frank and open on his experience once he publishes a book about his abduction in 2022.
“When I remember what I went through, I just want to cry,” he said in response to a question from a reporter at the event that also brought together Muslim clergy and the Law Society of Kenya.
But in an earlier rebuttal in one of the newspapers protesting what he claimed to be defamatory coverage of his ordeal, Abdisamad gave a sneak peak of his experience.
He said he was tortured and denied access to his lawyers and family while in detention.
The 55-year-old Abdisamad was abducted in Nairobi’s CBD along Tubman road.
Armed men wrestled him to the ground before bundling him into the carrier of a waiting double-cabin vehicle which then sped off.
The scholar said his leg “was badly injured…and I have been in and out of the hospital for the past week, refraining from all activities on my doctor’s advice.”
“I endured detention in a small room for 12 traumatic days. My captors warned me of dire consequences should I talk,” he said.
While he was away, there were speculations about the reasons for his abduction, with his published strong opinions on Kenya-Somalia relationship coming into scrutiny.
He claimed his abductors told him to warm former speaker of the National Assembly Farah Maalim and “two Kenyan lawyers to desist from affairs Somalia or else…”
Nandwa, on the other hand, is a professor of Islamic Sharia law at Umma University, and the lawyer of convicted and missing terrorist Elgiva Bwire.
He went missing together with his client as well as Elgiva’s mother on October 28. The mother was later released.
Bwire had just been freed from a 10-year jail term.
Nandwa would surface on November 8 at a thicket in Mwingi, Kitui county where he said he was dropped at 1 am.
His family have said their father have not told them what he went through but remained emotionally disturbed.
“He does not even want a conversation to get in the direction of what he went through and what those people did to him,” a lawyer friend of Nandwa told the Star, declining to be named for commenting on a private conversation.
Taimur went missing on June 28 after being arrested by Anti-terrorism Police Unit.
After numerous pull and push, the anti-terror court released him without any charges or conditions but the police rearrested him immediately.
According to his sister Fauziya Hussein, the police insisted they had freed him.
Five months later on November 27, he surfaced and returned home to Watamu, Kwale county.
His sister said through social media that her 39-year-old brother had arrived home safely and was resting.
But as in the other cases, nothing much came from him.
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