A somber mood engulfed Magumu village in Kinangop as police moved in to exhume a body that was wrongly buried last week in one of the homesteads.
Police who had obtained a court order from Engineer Law courts joined members of the public in exhuming the body of the middle aged man whose identity remains unknown.
Relatives of 21-year-old Paul Gicheche who was mistakenly buried in the father’s farm watched from a distance as the exercise was carried out.
Last month two bodies were found dumped in Ngumbi forest off the Limuru-Mai Mahiu road and taken to Naivasha sub-county hospital mortuary.
The family positively identified one of the bodies as that of Gicheche and a post mortem was conducted on the 5th of November and later buried on Tuesday.
However, on Thursday evening Gicheche presented himself to the police station in an incident that attracted hundreds of area residents.
According to the mother Elizbeth Mwihaki, her son had been missing for two months and a search led them to Naivasha mortuary where they saw a body similar to that of their kin.
Mwihaki told of the family joy after learning that his son was still alive adding that they wanted to forget the matter as fast as possible.
“At the back of my mind i had some doubts but this were confirmed when my son came back and we now have peace of mind,” she said.
An elder Mathenge Wairegi said that they had to perform a special cleansing ceremony in the home once the exhumation process was through.
He said that Gicheche had been ordered to stay away from the homestead until the ‘foreign’ body was removed as per the Kikuyu customs.
“Gicheche will only return home officially after a goat is slaughtered and a special ceremony conducted around the grave so as to cleanse this homestead,” he said.
Speaking to the press the causal labourer who looked shaken said that all along he had been working in Longonot trading center and was not aware of his ‘death’.
Gicheche said that he realized that something was amiss when he arrived at the nearby trading center and one of his friends kept his distance.
“There was no Tv, radio or even mobile phone where I was working and I was shocked when I returned home only to learn that that I had been declared dead and buried,” he said.