You were right Omollo. I was talking to my brother in law..and one of his childhood friend in his nairobi remand..but he swear the guy is normally out...they [prisoners] are allowed to go and steal at night..and be back to the safe walls of prison. Most of the time though all he does is to coordinate crime using his contacts out there..and guy is quite rich. He claims the guy is even fatter than when he was not in prison. He is ex-military who is waiting murder trial after they killed someone they had kidnapped along thika road. They use to do kidnapping for ransom...
I can add that he is "inside" because that is the best alibi money can buy. Try accusing him of committing a crime outside and see how far you get when the Prisons Authorities swear an affidavit that he is in "maximum" security prison!
When he has gotten rich enough, he will set himself free easily. He will arrange for his "dead" body to be collected at the prison, sent to the city mortuary and then buried in Langata or some burial site that issues a certificate. Such a person's file is often thorough complete with staged photos of the "dead" man. He infiltrates the useless Kajwang Offices and substitutes his fingerprints with those of some Ugandan or dead man. Either way a search for him using fingerprints will go nowhere. There is a special group that deals with deletion and creation of old and new identities. This group can penetrate the UN system to delete or create a person in their database. The last time I heard the service costs started from 300K.
The saddest part of all this is that in the past these thieves would hide largely because wananchi could report them and action would be taken. These days, wananchi know the dangers of even gossiping about it and they simply forget. However most criminals have adapted the Italian Mafia method. They simply migrate locally to other provinces or abroad to other countries and settle to enjoy their lives, occasionally dropping in to Kenya for a big job and vanishing back to the dead!
Most likely he will be acquitted on a day like Mpeketoni or Westgate. Nobody would notice.