In Kenya’s lush Thika region, just north of Nairobi, stealing pineapples is a de facto capital crime. At least nine men have allegedly been killed by security guards employed by Del Monte, the world’s largest producer of pineapples.

This series of killings first broke international news in June 2023, when The Guardian exposed a litany of deaths and violent assaults by the private security apparatus Del Monte employs to safeguard its crop from thieves. The corporation’s security guards stand accused by locals of killing nine men aged twenty-two to fifty-two since 2013 — “as well as five rapes, plus allegations of serious injuries, including head wounds, broken bones and cuts from blades requiring stitches.”

The killings in question were brutal, with most victims dying of blunt force trauma inflicted by cudgels, rocks, and fists. Attempts to dispose of bodies killed on Del Monte property were equally crude. The body of Stephen Thuo Nyoike, killed at twenty-two, was found strangled with wire by a public road. Saidi Ngotho Ndungu was found floating in a dam, while the corpses of four men were recovered from a river on Christmas Day.