Nairobi, when they noticed someone suspicious. A woman was loitering outside their front gate, talking on her mobile phone, just as she had been doing in the same location when they first left for work that morning. The brothers got in their car to leave, but a few yards down the road the woman, together with two men, blocked their way with several vehicles. They approached the car and pulled Aslam from the driver’s seat. The 36-year-old had been a vocal participant in the antigovernment protests that recently shook the country. Even though they were in plain clothes, Jamil, 42, told Al Jazeera he believed the heavily armed group that approached them were police, pointing to a wave of abductions of political dissidents in Kenya which rights groups say is being carried out by state agents, and a warning he had received. Less than two weeks before the incident, Jamil, who is also a human rights activist, said a top security official in the area called him and told him to warn his brother never to attend protests again. If Aslam did, “they might harm him”, the caller said.

As the armed men grabbed Aslam from the car that day, shoving him into their waiting SUV, Jamil dashed out, asking the group for proof of their identity and demanding to know whether it was a legal arrest. When they refused to answer, Jamil threatened to call the local police station. “Noticing my seriousness, they also grabbed me and forced me into the vehicle, blindfolded us, and drove towards the city and around so we could not comprehend our location,” he said. The brothers say they were held in a dark room for 32 days where they were beaten and threatened with death if they did not reveal information about who funded the local protests in Kitengela.

“They would only open the room every 24 hours to give us a small portion of ugali [maize meal] and would only give us 500ml of water once every 24 hours … [and] provided a small can that would be our toilet,” Jamil told Al Jazeera.