In a ruling that was very rare and also emotionally charged, the High Court has officially announced that a businessman who went missing in Nairobi almost four years ago is dead by law, which puts an end to lengthy litigation and at the same time acknowledges what the family has always feared—that he was among those who disappeared by force.
The order that was given on 21 January 2026 marked the end of one of the most mysterious disappearance cases in Kenya.
The person declared deceased was the 70-year-old Kuni Halanka, who was last seen on February 7, 2022, when he took a taxi from a hotel in Lang’ata to an unknown destination. The car was stopped on Likoni Road by individuals pretending to be officers, who forcibly removed him from the vehicle and took him away. Since then, no one has seen or heard from him.
The family of Halanka went through a very painful ordeal trying to find him, as they quickly informed the police and also applied for a writ of habeas corpus, which demands the state to produce the missing person, dead or alive.
Despite a court order that required the police to reveal his location, the authorities did not give any information about him, making the investigation go nowhere and leaving the family still waiting.
In a ruling that greatly advanced the issue, Justice Francis Rayola concluded that the disappearance of Halanka—among other factors, the attendance of the taxi driver and the lack of any evidence of voluntary disappearance—pointed very strongly to the opposite conclusion of his being alive.
He even went to the extent of blaming police for the delayed inaction and lack of progress in the investigation as being unjust and unconscionable in that they made the family wait for the statutory seven years before granting them death presumption.
The court mandated the Registrar of Births and Deaths to produce a death certificate that will be retroactively dated to the last day Halanka was spotted. This court order allows the dead man’s family to settle his estate and even to access a portion of legal and financial rights that had been blocked due to the uncertainty of his death.
Halanka’s legal death declaration marks a notable judicial precedent in Kenya for the disappearance cases that have remained unresolved for a long time and where state investigations have been unproductive.
A legal analyst opines that the decision emphasizes the inadequacy of the prevailing mechanisms for dealing with mysterious disappearances and that it also necessitates the urgent establishment of more stringent oversight and accountability in police investigations.
The lawyer of the family greeted the ruling, calling it a tough-fought victory that at last brings about closure after a prolongation of questions and emotional suffering. However, the authorities have not given any public statement regarding the impact of the ruling on the current or future cases of kidnapping that are being investigated.
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