Bogonko Bosire was one of the foremost bloggers in the early days of the digital explosion in Kenya. The blogger ran the highly successful and controversial, Jackal News website.
The site gained prominence for publishing scandalous news about the high and the mighty. It was in essence, a tabloid; something that might have garnered many enemies in a country such as ours.
The man disappeared from the streets of Nairobi on Wednesday, September 18, 2013, and has never been seen since. His parents Mzee David Bosire and his wife, Esther are still wondering what happened to their son?
The couple who live on Rwangondu Farm, Kuresoi North Constituency, Nakuru County had been praying that the son returns home to no avail.
His parents spoke to the Standard newspaper of loss and unfulfilled dreams as regards their son. A month before he disappeared, Mzee Bosire said his son had called, asking him to look for stones to build two houses; one for his parents and one for himself.
His mother also told the paper that two weeks before he disappeared, Bogonko called and said he was soon going to work at State House.
His brother, Elkana once told the paper in an interview that he had been living with his brother for close to 5 years in Nairobi’s South B area.
He told the paper that during that fateful period the blogger had not communicated with him for some time which was ‘unlike him’.
He immediately called Bogonko’s friend, Dennis Itumbi, who at that time worked as a director at the Presidential Strategic Communications Unit.
Itumbi, he said, was also looking for the Jackal News editor. Elkanah told the paper that he also visited the mortuary to check for his brother’s body, as the Westgate terror attack had just occurred two days after his disappearance.
The family then filed a missing person’s report at Industrial Area Police Station but little came of it. Two months later, the family was informed by the police that they had found someone resembling the blogger but later found out that it wasn’t him.
What about phone records? Elkanah told the paper that efforts to get records of his brother’s last communications from Safaricom were unfruitful, as they refused to release them.
He also says that he was worried that someone had been listening to his phone conversations and so stopped looking for answers.
Bogonko’s last known pictures were taken in a town called Kimbimbi at a hotspot called Jubilee Bar, before later on leaving for Nairobi town on Tuesday, September 17th.
One of his brother’s, Joseph, told the paper that he was a secretive person who never revealed what he was doing.
Some speculate his exposé on the blog might have earned him powerful enemies; something that might have contributed to his disappearance.
There were also rumours that he was in one way or the other involved in the Kenyan cases at the International Criminal Court over the 2007 post-election violence.
But who knows.
What is a fact is that the blogger has still not been seen for 6 years?
Sources; The Standard