By Edwin Okoth and Humphrey Malalo
NAIROBI, June 12 (Reuters) – A person who was killed this week during a protest in central Kenya against a quarantine facility for Americans exposed to Ebola was a teenager who had left home to pick up a new school uniform, his grandmother said.
The grandmother, who lived with 17-year-old Sylvester Muigai and spoke to Reuters in an interview, said police told her he was killed by a tear-gas canister and not a bullet, contrary to what multiple eyewitnesses and a protest leader had said on Tuesday, the day he died.
Two Reuters reporters, who did not witness Muigai’s death themselves, saw a body lying motionless with a large wound to the head in a police van in the town of Nanyuki where the protest took place.
Asked for comment on Friday, local police commander Daniel Kitavi said the person who died “was a rioter, I don’t know if he’s a student”.
U.S. EBOLA FACILITY ANGERS KENYANS
The plan for the facility at the Laikipia Air Base, next to Nanyuki, has angered many Kenyans, triggering several days of protests.
A court has ordered a stop to work on the proposed 50-bed unit, but U.S. and diplomatic sources and flight tracking data show U.S. military planes have continued to ferry in staff and equipment since the court’s rulings.
“We went to the police station yesterday and after being taken round for hours, the police told us that it was a tear-gas canister that killed him and not a bullet,” Muigai’s grandmother, Miriam Njoki, told Reuters by phone.
She said Muigai was a student at Nanyuki’s Thingithu Secondary School and that he had left home to get a new uniform from his aunt’s house in Likii, a nearby neighbourhood, when he got caught up in the protest.
PROTESTERS SAY U.S. IS OFFLOADING EBOLA RISK
The facility’s opponents say the U.S. is offloading the risk of caring for those exposed to the Ebola outbreak in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration has said it will not allow any Ebola cases to enter the U.S.
The Nanyuki facility is designated for Americans who have been exposed to the virus but do not show symptoms. Kenyan officials have said the facility would also serve Kenyans and foreign nationals, but U.S. officials have not confirmed this.
Many protesters have also directed their anger at Kenyan President William Ruto, who last week said his government was doing “the right thing” by allowing the U.S. to build the centre.
Security sources say at least two other people have been killed in the Nanyuki protests.
(Reporting by Edwin Okoth and Humphrey Malalo; Writing by George Obulutsa; Editing by Alexander Winning and Kate Mayberry)
Copyright 2026 Thomson Reuters.
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