Caroline Mwatha
1981–2019 (age 38)
human rights activist
Biography
On 6 February 2019, 37-year-old Caroline Mwatha Ochieng’, a Kenyan human rights activist and founder of the Dandora Community Center (which investigates and documents cases of police killings in Dandora), went missing.
Her disappearance drew a lot of attention with Kenyans mobilising on social platforms such as Twitter, under the Hashtag #FindCarolineMwatha to draw attention on the matter. The then Nairobi Governor, Mike Sonko, promised a bounty of Ksh 300,000 to anybody who had any information regarding her whereabouts.
Her body was found in Nairobi's City mortuary on 12 February where it had been registered under a different name. Police reports established that she had died on 7 February. A post-mortem examination determined that she died due to exsanguination. The bleeding was caused by a rupture at the rear of her uterus, reportedly as the result of an unsafe abortion. The remains of a male fetus were still in the womb, minus a hand.