The Hunting Ground:
How Nairobi Became Africa’s Capital of Transnational Repression

On a Sunday afternoon in January 2025, Maria Sarungi Tsehai — a Tanzanian human rights defender and media editor — was driving through Nairobi’s Kilimani district when a black Toyota Noah pulled alongside her car. Three men forced her into their vehicle. Her phone was taken. She would be interrogated and released hours later, shaken but alive, the latest entry in a database that now spans more than two decades of foreign-orchestrated seizures on Kenyan soil.

Her case is not an aberration. It is a data point in a pattern so consistent, so geometrically precise in its methods, that it demands a different name than kidnapping. This is infrastructure — a transnational repression corridor running through East Africa’s most cosmopolitan hub, where authoritarian governments across multiple continents have learned they can silence their critics with near-total impunity.

The Architecture of Abduction

The data, compiled from open-source intelligence, court records, survivor testimony, and verified media reports, documents 29 distinct cases between 1999 and January 2025. The numbers tell a story that political speeches do not: Kenya has become, by any quantitative measure, the most active site of transnational repression on the African continent.

In 14 of 21 core cases, Kenyan intelligence services appeared in some operational capacity — as the executing agency, as facilitators, or as knowing bystanders. The trend line is unambiguous: documented cases more than doubled in the 2023–2025 window compared to 2020–2022. Nine cases were recorded in 2024 alone — the highest in the dataset’s 26-year span.

Who Is Being Hunted

The victims are not criminals in any conventional sense. Cross-referencing their affiliations and professional backgrounds reveals a taxonomy of political inconvenience: opposition politicians, human rights defenders, separatist leaders, government critics in exile, bloggers, journalists, and academics.

“The terrorism charge has become the universal lubricant of authoritarian extradition — deployed against a Muslim preacher, a head of state’s political rival, a lawyer, and a university student alike.”

The most cynical instrument in this apparatus is the terrorism accusation. Of 21 core cases analyzed in depth, eight were charged under terrorism provisions — representing 38% of all cases. Yet the alleged “terrorists” include Selahaddin Gülen, a religious educator seized by Turkish intelligence on Kiambu Road; Kizza Besigye, Uganda’s most prominent opposition leader, taken from his Riverside Drive apartment; and 36 members of Uganda’s Forum for Democratic Change, rounded up at a Catholic pastoral center in Kisumu.

The Digital Dimension: Phones as Primary Targets

Perhaps the most revealing pattern in the dataset is not who is taken, but what is taken from them. In case after case — across different years, different nationalities, different perpetrating governments — the seizure of mobile phones is near-universal. 95% of victims had their phones confiscated.

This pattern — surveillance precedes seizure, and the device is always taken — points to something more sinister than ordinary abduction. The phone is the intelligence payload. What these operations harvest is not simply a dissident’s body but their entire digital network: contacts, encrypted messages, source lists, organizational maps.

The Turkish Connection: A 25-Year Campaign

No foreign government has been more consistently active on Kenyan soil than Turkey. The dataset spans a quarter-century of Turkish operations: from the 1999 seizure of Kurdish leader Abdullah Öcalan at the Greek Ambassador’s residence — carried out by Turkish military elites alongside CIA-Mossad assets — to the 2024 mass abduction of seven Hizmet movement members from Kileleshwa. The charges in every Turkish case are identical: terrorism.

South Sudan’s Kill List in Nairobi

If Turkey represents the most sophisticated and prolific foreign operator in this dataset, South Sudan’s operations represent the most lethal. Three of the five people killed or disappeared are connected to the South Sudan government’s reach into Kenya. Dong Samuel Luak, a human rights lawyer, was taken from Kaunda Street and killed in Juba days later. Aggrey Ezbon Idri was kidnapped during his morning jog — 24 hours after Luak — in a coordinated dual operation. James Gatdet Dak Lampuor, spokesperson for opposition leader Riek Machar, was taken from his home in Lavington and sentenced to death.

The Kenyan State’s Role: Complicit or Captured?

The hardest question this data forces is one that no Kenyan government has formally answered: how much of this is policy? In 67% of documented cases, Kenyan intelligence, police, or security services appear in the operational record — as executing body, co-conspirator, or provider of advance surveillance.

“Nairobi has not merely failed to protect refugees and exiles on its soil. In case after case, it has actively participated in their delivery to the governments they fled.”

The expansion into domestic targets in 2024 is perhaps the most alarming recent development. Five cases involve Kenyan citizens: blogger Peter Mutebi, seized by four armed men in a black Toyota Prado; and Wajir County MCA Yussuf Hussein Ahmed, taken off Enterprise Road. These are not foreign operations — these are domestic repressions wearing the same methodological clothes as the transnational cases.

The Disappeared: Three People Still Missing

Samson Teklemichael, an Ethiopian businessman, was seized from his car on a busy Kileleshwa road in broad daylight, on camera, in front of witnesses. Ethiopian media demanded answers. The footage was published. He has never been found. Abdirahman Ahmed Dakane, a Somali teacher taken by Kenya’s Anti-Terrorism Police Unit in Garissa, has been missing for nearly a decade. Mohammad Abubakar Said, a university student forced into a vehicle in Mombasa, has not been seen since 2021. Their fates remain unknown.

The Corridor That Stays Open

What this data shows, in aggregate, is not a series of isolated incidents but a durable system — one that has survived multiple Kenyan administrations, multiple diplomatic crises, and multiple international condemnations. The acceleration in 2024, with nine documented cases, suggests the system is not only persisting but expanding.

The victims are diverse. The perpetrating states are diverse. The methods are not. Every operation involves prior surveillance. Every one involves phone seizure. Most involve some form of Kenyan state complicity. The “terrorism” charge is applied with such frequency to people who are manifestly not terrorists — opposition politicians, preachers, academics, bloggers — that it has ceased to function as a legal category and become instead a diplomatic password: the word that unlocks Kenyan cooperation.

Until Kenya enacts and enforces binding legal protections for persons on its soil against extrajudicial rendition — and until it is held accountable for the cases in which its own security services have been the instrument of foreign repression — the corridor will stay open. Nairobi will remain what the data says it already is: the hunting ground.

Methodology

This investigation is based on data compiled across two structured datasets spanning 1999–2025, incorporating 29 documented cases from open-source intelligence (OSINT), survivor testimony, court filings, verified media reports, and civil society documentation. Cases were cross-referenced and analyzed for temporal, geographic, methodological, and actor-based patterns.