SUNS  4319 Monday 7 November 1998



United States: Lynching suspected in Kenyan student's death



New York, Nov 5 (IPS/Farhan Haq) -- U.S. federal authorities and concerned Kenyan-Americans are pushing for a full investigation into the mysterious death in August of a Kenyan nursing student in Muscle Shoals, Alabama.

While an initial autopsy concluded that 20-year-old Catherine Mutheki had committed suicide by hanging herself, authorities in Muscle Shoals now say they have to wait for final autopsy results to determine the cause of the student's death.

She disappeared and died just after the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam were bombed on Aug. 7, allegedly by radical Islamists, and the suspicions her case has raised have grown to the point where the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Department of Justice are
now involved.

Members of the local Kenyan community, who talked to IPS under condition of anonymity, have argued that Mutheki's hanging, so soon after more than 250 people - including U.S. nationals - were killed in the Nairobi blast, could have been a lynching.

At least one of Mutheki's friends has told IPS that the student, who had arrived to learn nursing at the Northwest-Shoals Community College in March, had become afraid of the small Southern community and told at least one teacher that she was being stalked by someone on the campus.

The FBI has formally opened a file on Mutheki's death, while the Justice Department is expected to reach a decision soon on whether to launch a civil-rights investigation into the case, said Martin White, a Kenyan-American attorney based in New York.

At least part of the concern, White argued, is that the Muscle Shoals police have yet to provide a definitive explanation for Mutheki's death, or why they have described the case as a suicide.

Police officials initially suggested that Mutheki may have had financial troubles or problems with her studies - arguments, White said, which were countered by her record of paying tuition promptly and
her excellent grades.

"The police have changed their story all the way along," White contended. Repeated calls to police officials in Muscle Shoals were not returned, but the town's assistant police chief, David Bradford, told local press that Mutheki's death was "consistent with suicide hanging" because "there was no other trauma to the body, and there was no medical evidence of a sexual assault or anything of that nature."

At the time of her death, Mutheki was enrolled at Northwest-Shoals as full-time summer student, said Jim Silverberg, a spokesman for the college. Until Monday, Aug. 10, she had never missed a class and maintained top grades in all classes.

Last seen on Sunday, Aug. 9, Mutheki was found dead four days later, hanging from a tree some 200 yards from her college dormitory. In his efforts to bring the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division to investigate the case, White contended that Mutheki was "hanging so low that, apparently, she could have stopped her asphyxiation by placing her feet on the ground at any time."

One of Mutheki's friends, who lives in the nearby city of Birmingham, contended that after living briefly in Muscle Shoals, the nursing student said she wanted to transfer to a different college and began to show signs of suspicion with her community.

"She would call us by pay-phones" rather than the phone in her own room, the friend said. "Probably she was afraid of speaking on the phone ... She would even translate every part of her e-mails (into Kiswahili), and said she would not be able to write much."

Just two days before her disappearance - and at roughly the same time that the Aug. 7 bombings struck the U.S. embassies - Mutheki left a message on her friend's answering machine, which simply said, "I'm feeling threatened."

"I believe the impetus to this hanging was likely the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Kenya," White wrote in a letter to the Department of Justice.

"Having read (Internet messages) during that week, it became apparent that many persons believed that native Kenyans had perpetrated that crime. Unfortunately, not every simple person out there understands that Kenya was used simply because terrorists found Kenya convenient because of its location and porous borders."

Lynchings - which involved often public hangings of African-Americans by white Southerners, including racist organisations like the Ku Klux Klan - were a major concern in the US as recently as the 1950s. More recently, African-American ministers in the South warned of a rash of suspicious fires that destroyed several black churches in 1996.

Alabama has had a particularly unsavoury reputation for racist violence, including the 1964 bombing of a Birmingham church, which killed four black girls, and the harassment of civil-rights marchers travelling from Selma to Montgomery the following year.

Birmingham has changed since then, with race  relations "not a problem", one Kenyan-American living in the city told IPS. But Muscle Shoals, a much smaller and more isolated community, could well have seemed hostile to a newcomer like Catherine Mutheki, she added.