12 June,2011 07:52 AM IST | | AFP
The death of a Kenyan marathon champion, first thought accidental, has been tarred by suspicions of suicide, accusations of murder, and reports that the star became a hard-drinking adulterer after winning gold in Beijing.
Sammy Wanjiru
The only thing known for sure is that Sammy Wanjiru was found dead on May 16 aged 24 after a fall from the balcony of his home in Nyahururu, 150 kilometres (90 miles) north of Nairobi in Kenya's Rift Valley. The night before, Wanjiru's wife Trizah Njeri returned home to find her husband in the marital bedroom with a young barmaid, according to local police chief Jasper Ombati. Furious, she locked the couple in and stormed out.
According to a preliminary reconstruction of events, Wanjiru, who had been drinking, forgot he was on the upper floor, headed onto the balcony and, thinking he would stop his wife, jumped into thin air and fell to the ground, dying a few hours later in hospital. But after further questioning of the two women and the night guard, police began pursuing other theories, even toying briefly with the idea of a suicide.
An autopsy was finally carried out at the request of Wanjiru's mother Hannah more than two weeks after the runner's death. The results partly contradicted the police findings, with two of the three pathologists involved concluding that Wanjiru's death was caused by a violent blow to the back of the head.
And since wounds sustained to the knees and the hands indicated he fell face down, the injury to the back of the head could not have been caused by the fall. "Our investigation is continuing, but as we said, the preliminary inquiry showed he fell accidentally," Ombati said. Also, a court has finally ruled that Wanjiru'su00a0 burial can go ahead, a month after his death.
