Friends hint victim had seen bad signs

Dar es Salaam. Kenyan national, Francis Shumila, who died on Wednesday following the tragic family shooting in Dar es Salaam, reached out to several friends hours into the shocking incident in which two other people died.

Shumila apparently shared intimate personal details with friends a few days earlier, in what they are now describing as an ominous sign that death may have been beckoning for the 41-year-old.

It is also emerging that the deceased was a student at the Dar es Salaam Maritime Institute (DMI) and was due to sit his maritime transportation (Class Three) exams next year.

A former colleague at the college, Mwanamkasi Mhando, told The Citizen on Saturday, that two days before the fatal shooting, the deceased asked to meet her, during which he talked at length about his health, his sick mother, fiancée and a wish to have a baby.

“Contrary to our normal conversations (in the past), that Saturday was totally different and strange. I still don’t know why Shumila decided to have breakfast with me.”

“He extoled the love he had for his mom whom he revealed was sick. “My mother loves me so much that if anything bad happened to me she would die,” Ms Mhando narrated.

According to her, Shumila whom she described as intelligent and smart, vowed to spend every cent of his earnings to ensure the mom was cured of her sickness.

“He also disclosed that he was a diabetic. “I have my medications in the car there and treat myself if I feel sick.” “The conversation was so strange and baffling because for the first time he was telling me a lot of things about his personal life and his girlfriend’s. He was lamenting why she was reluctant to have a baby with him.”

“You know I am a grown up man now, I need a baby. I really want a baby by now,” Ms Mhando quoted him as saying during their last encounter in a popular eatery in the city.

The friend recalled the Kenyan saying how fond he was of his would be in-laws. “I am so close with them to the extent that they believe and rely on my counsel whenever a situation requiring it arises.”

It was at this encounter that Shumila asked from Ms Mhando the telephone numbers of other DMI colleagues he had wanted to talk to. “Among them was Navuri Challi who told me that Saturday night that Shumila called her and promised that they will meet before he went back to Mombasa, his home city.” Ms Mhando said in the end it is ironical that the death of someone she had seen barely two days would be the one involved in the shooting which she casually read about in the newspapers and never imagined it would turn the way it did.

Shumila’s death came after that of Alfa Alfred, 34, and Gabriel Munisi, both of whom died at the scene of the dramatic shooting on Tuesday.

Munisi opened fire on a family vehicle driven by the Kenyan as they drove out of their house to escort one of his in-laws to Julius Nyerere International Airport for a trip to Cyprus. He fired a dozen bullets from a pistol that caught the victims before turning the weapon on himself.

The elderly mother of the two women victims, Hellen Eliezer, was treated and discharged from the Muhimbili National Hospital on Thursday. She was shot in the back.