“Cyber-scam operations have significantly benefitted from developments in the fintech industry, including cryptocurrencies, with apps being directly developed for use at [cyber-scam] compounds to launder money,” said Kristina Amerhauser, of the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime.
He was taken to a hospital in the area, but after a week at the facility, “he disappeared”, Otieno told Al Jazeera.“We reported to the police and started looking for him everywhere, panicked that we might never see him again. Later, we had information from some neighbours that he is in Migori at a church. That’s when we went there to ask the church leaders where he was. They told us he was not at the church and had not seen him.
“About a month later, they called us to say that the person we were looking for had died the previous night and that they had buried him that day.”The family then informed the police and human rights activists like Kiarie, and travelled to Opapo to try and locate his body.Kiarie, who is a rights defender and paralegal at the Nyando Social Justice Centre, accompanied the family to Opapo in March.
“We’ve not been given the body,” she told Al Jazeera, explaining that she interviewed residents and church members while in Opapo and heard concerning reports about what was happening at the compound.No one was allowed to have an intimate relationship at the church, she said, while husbands and wives were required to separate after joining. These practices were echoed by the compound’s neighbours in Migori.
“There are also serious claims of sexual violence at the church where the male leaders were having sex with the girls and women there,” Kiarie said. “That was why they did not want any man inside to touch the women because they belonged to them,” she alleged.
Kiarie said since the police raid, the compound’s neighbours have also reported there may be more than just two bodies buried inside – which she said could be what is delaying Obura’s exhumation. “They’re still waiting because they said the issue has been picked up by the national government, and they [the national authorities] want to exhume the other bodies [that may be there],” she said.“It’s an historic day,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said after the vote.
The agreement’s text wasfinalised last month
after multiple rounds of tense negotiations.“The world is safer today thanks to the leadership, collaboration and commitment of our member states to adopt the historic WHO Pandemic Agreement,” Tedros said in a statement.