Mercy Wanjiru Ndungu speaks from inside her single-room tin shack in Nairobi’s Kasarani neighborhood, her voice tight with emotion. “I feel so much bitterness,” she says, her eyes red and glassy. “When I think about my daughter, I feel like I want to die. But I’m waiting on God for justice.”
Wanjiru’s twenty-one-year-old daughter, Beatrice Waruguru, a smart secondary school graduate, traveled to Saudi Arabia for domestic work in 2021. Beatrice had dreamed of university and lifting her family from poverty. But just months after arriving, the family received news that Beatrice was dead.
The Saudi death certificate ruled it a suicide. But when Beatrice’s body was repatriated, her eyes were gouged out, and she had visible marks of torture, including burns. The family believes her Saudi employer murdered her.
“I can’t get that image of her body out of my head,” Wanjiru sobs. “She died in terrible pain. It haunts me every single day.”
Beatrice’s death echoes painfully for families across Kenya. In the past five years, at least 274 Kenyan migrants, predominantly women, have died in Saudi Arabia. At least fifty-five Kenyan workers died last year, twice as many as the previous year. Saudi officials often rule these deaths as “natural” — or due to “cardiac arrest” and “suicide” — in autopsy reports, despite signs of abuse. Many families, whose daughters left Kenya in perfect health, suspect foul play.
Kenyans have also returned from Saudi Arabia — dead and alive — with suspicious scars suggesting organ harvesting. In several cases, women reported undergoing unexplained medical procedures, only to later discover that a kidney had been removed without their knowledge.
Auteur: Jaclynn Ashly
