Not Among the Deported: A Kenyan Mother's Two-Year Search for the Son Dubai Swallowed
His colleagues were arrested in the same June 2024 raid and came home months later. John Maina Wanjiru never did — and no official record says why.
For more than a year, the rhythm of Jacinta's week in Kenya was set by a phone call from the Gulf. Her son, John Maina Wanjiru, had flown to Dubai on 15 May 2023 to work, and he called home every week without fail — brief, reassuring conversations from a young man building something abroad, the kind of calls that thousands of Kenyan families have learned to organise their lives around.
On 25 June 2024, the calls stopped.
More than two years later, the family still does not know where Maina is. His story, reported this week by TUKO.co.ke after months of quiet searching by his relatives, has become one of the most unsettling consular cases to emerge from the Kenyan community in the United Arab Emirates: a man reportedly arrested in front of witnesses, never charged, never deported, and — according to his family — never once accounted for in an official record they have been allowed to see.
A Raid at Grand Ajman Mall
According to the account given to TUKO.co.ke by family friend Winnie Wangari, Maina was working as a telesales agent at Grand Ajman Mall, in the emirate of Ajman, when authorities carried out a security operation in June 2024. Colleagues who were detained alongside him later told the family that Maina was taken into custody during the crackdown.
Such operations are a familiar feature of life for migrant workers in the Emirates, where periodic sweeps target visa violations and unlicensed work. What made this one different, for one family in Kenya, is what happened afterwards — or rather, what never happened.
The Ones Who Came Home
The colleagues arrested with Maina were eventually deported and returned to Kenya. He was not among them. That single fact has shaped every month of the family's search since: if the others were processed, deported and sent home, where did the system put John Maina Wanjiru?
The detail that troubles the family most is bureaucratic rather than dramatic. Maina's UAE visa remained active until 26 February 2026 — nearly two years after his reported arrest. During that window, relatives, friends and Kenyan diplomatic officials tried to trace him through police stations, prisons and deportation centres, TUKO.co.ke reported. Nothing surfaced.
The family says it repeatedly contacted the Kenyan Embassy and Consulate in the UAE, only to be told that Maina was not listed in police custody. They filed reports with the Dubai Police's General Department of Criminal Investigations and sought help from Kenya's State Department for Diaspora Affairs. The answer, in every direction, was silence.
A Case File That Reached Parliament
The disappearance did not stay a private grief. On 30 April 2025, Narok North Member of Parliament Agnes Pareiyo formally raised Maina's case in Kenya's National Assembly and called on the government to open a comprehensive investigation, according to the family's account reported by TUKO.co.ke.
A parliamentary mention is, in theory, the strongest tool a Kenyan family has when a relative vanishes abroad: it puts a name into the official record and obliges ministries to respond. More than a year later, the family says the intervention has yet to yield meaningful answers. The case file exists in Nairobi. The man it describes remains unlocated in the Emirates.
A Mother Searches the Emirates
In November 2025, Jacinta did what the paperwork could not: she flew to the UAE herself and spent weeks searching. She visited the Kenyan Consulate. She walked malls, hotels and parks. She posted appeals on social media in a country where she had never lived, looking for anyone who might have crossed paths with her son.
Her most significant lead came from a security guard who, she says, witnessed the June 2024 operation. The guard told her that everyone present in the building that day was arrested and transferred to facilities in Abu Dhabi. He himself was released after his employer intervened. Maina, with no one to intervene for him, was not.
It is on the strength of that testimony — and the accounts of the deported colleagues — that the family now believes Maina may still be held in a detention facility in Abu Dhabi, never formally charged, never given legal representation, and never the subject of any official communication to his relatives.
The DNA Call
The cruellest turn came when the family was contacted about human remains discovered in the Dubai desert. Jacinta travelled to give a DNA sample and waited for a result no mother should have to wait for.
The remains were not her son's. The finding closed one terrible possibility and opened nothing in its place. The family was returned to the same blank uncertainty it has lived in since June 2024 — relieved, and no closer to an answer.
A Pattern the Diaspora Knows Too Well
Maina's case is singular in its details but not in its shape. In 2024, Kenyan outlets including Mwakilishi and TUKO.co.ke reported on families pleading for news of relatives held in Dubai for months without charge after a separate workplace incident, describing the same wall: an embassy with no information, UAE authorities with no comment, and relatives left to assemble the truth from deportees' fragments.
For the hundreds of thousands of Kenyans working across the Gulf, the case lands on a raw nerve. Nairobi has spent the past year promising better protection for its workers in the region, including new labour consultations with Gulf governments. Families like Maina's measure those promises against a simpler standard: when a son disappears inside a foreign system, can his own government find out where he is?
Two years on, for Jacinta, the answer has been no. Her family is asking Kenya's government to press the UAE for a formal accounting — a charge, a location, a record, anything. Until then, she keeps her phone charged. The week still has a shape. The call still has a time. It just never comes.
