The High Court has overturned the convictions of three men, including two Kenya Airways cabin crew members, who had been sentenced to 25 years in prison for trafficking heroin worth Sh 59.6 million.

Lennox Chengek Chestit, Alfric Odhiambo Otieno and ground staff supervisor Kenneth Sinzore Isundu are now free men after Kibera High Court Judge Diana Kavedza ruled that the state's case was built on speculation, severe procedural blunders and a broken chain of evidence.

The August 25 2026 judgment quashes a November 2025 lower court decision that had slapped the three airline workers with staggering collective fines totalling Sh 179 million.

The dramatic case began in the early morning hours of November 2, 2017, at the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (JKIA) in Nairobi.

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Acting on a tip-off, a multi-agency security team, including Anti-Narcotics Unit officers, swarmed a Kenya Airways aircraft at Bay 19 just as the cabin crew was preparing for a flight to Lagos, Nigeria.

Security officers ordered all 12 crew members to stand next to their luggage for an emergency inspection.

The prosecution claimed that a search of Chestit’s suitcase and an adjacent backpack yielded ten packets of heroin weighing 9.8 kilograms.

Another ten packages weighing 10 kilograms were allegedly pulled from Otieno's luggage.

Isundu, a turnaround coordinator, was arrested on the airport tarmac on allegations that he used an official airport pool vehicle to help transport the narcotics to the plane.

During the trial, a completely different version of events emerged, exposing a deeply compromised search operation inside the aircraft.

Chestit testified that during the tense briefing, a security officer aggressively demanded his mobile phone, slapped him when he refused to unlock it and forced him to the front of the plane into business class.

Fearing for his safety, Chestit tried to escape from the aircraft doors but was physically restrained and held under guard.

Crucially, the defence pointed out that the actual recovery of the drugs happened at the back of the plane while the suspects were locked away at the front.

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Furthermore, all the state witnesses, including the senior police officers, admitted under cross-examination that they completely failed to fill out an official inventory form inside the aircraft to document exactly what was found and where.

In her judgement, Justice Kavedza criticised the police for failing to preserve an unbroken chain of custody, which is vital in high-value narcotics cases.

Instead of labelling and photographing the seized substances immediately at the crime scene, officers carried the loose packages to the anti-narcotics airport offices, marking and numbering them hours later.

The judge noted that this opened up a dangerous gap, making it impossible to prove that the packages tested in the government laboratory were the exact same items lifted from the plane.

To make matters worse, the police officers who took the stand actively contradicted each other, with none of them able to definitively remember or point out who exactly searched Otieno's bag or who labelled the exhibits.

The state’s case against Isundu, the ground staff coordinator, relied almost entirely on security camera footage analysed by a cybercrime forensic expert.

The prosecution claimed that the airport’s vast surveillance network tracked Isundu picking up the crew members and their heavy bags.

However, during a dramatic cross-examination, the cybercrime expert admitted that he did not know any of the accused men and could not actually identify their faces in any of the 69 video clips presented to the court.

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The court heard that the aircraft doors were already open before the crew boarded, meaning anyone with airport airside access could have planted the backpack inside the coatroom.

In her final analysis, Justice Kavedza ruled that the prosecution had completely failed to link the three airline workers to the contraband beyond a reasonable doubt.

The judge stated that the state had failed to rule out the very real possibility that an external party had smuggled the drugs onto the plane before the crew even arrived.

"Suspicion, however strong, cannot substitute proof beyond reasonable doubt," Justice Kavedza declared, highlighting that visual recognition errors cannot be used to jail citizens.

With the convictions officially quashed and the heavy fines erased, the judge ordered the immediate release of the three men unless they are being held for other lawful reasons.

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bmatheka@ke.nationmedia.com