40 patients escape from hospital

Police in Nairobi launch a major hunt for 40 mentally ill patients who escaped from Mathari Mental Hospital yesterday.

Nairobi

Forty mentally ill patients have escaped from the Mathari Mental Hospital in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, after overpowering guards, police say.

A search has been launched for the patients, some of whom are known to be violent, police told the BBC.
The group escaped from the state hospital after complaining that the medicine given to them was ineffective.

Mathari is the biggest psychiatric hospital in Kenya. In 2011, rights groups called for an investigation into alleged human rights abuses at the hospital following a CNN documentary “Locked up and Forgotten”.

The CNN crew reported that during a visit to the hospital, they found a dead body locked up in a seclusion cell with a patient. Senior Nairobi police officer Moses Ombati told the BBC the patients had staged a protest, before overpowering guards and escaping.

The hospital reported the escape to police on Sunday, prompting a major search for the patients, divisional police chief Samuel Anampiu is quoted as saying. “We have all their particulars and including their pictures and that will make it easy for us to identify them,” he said.

The Nairobi-based facility is a national referral hospital for psychiatry and the main teaching psychiatric hospital and hosts a total of 75 mental patients.

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