Four rescued in Nairobi collapse, but shop occupants remain unaccounted for

Four people had been rescued alive from the collapsed high-rise in Nairobi’s Eastleigh neighborhood by Sunday, October 25. Yet the central question remained unanswered: who was still missing? Officials had accounted for the construction workforce, but shops were operating beneath the unfinished building, and there was no reconciled public accounting of their occupants. The rescue total was a concrete advance. It was not a measure of how close the search was to finding everyone. ^{40 10}

People Daily’s Sunday report, displayed at 6:16 p.m. East Africa Time, attributed the four rescues to police; Associated Press reporting also put the cumulative figure at four on the response’s third day. That supersedes earlier accounts of one survivor and then two—not four additional people to add to those reports. No confirmed death toll was established in the available reporting. That is not the same as a verified toll of zero. ^{40 38}

The building came down on Friday afternoon, October 23, 2026, at the 9th Street site in Eastleigh, a densely populated business and residential area. Reports also locate it along Yusuf Haji Avenue, near Day to Day Supermarket. Those descriptions identify the same emergency without establishing that the two street names are interchangeable. ^{27 29}

Interior Cabinet Secretary Kipchumba Murkomen’s account separated the construction workers from everyone else: all 67 workers were accounted for, with 66 escaping unharmed and one hospitalized in stable condition with injuries described as not life-threatening. It was a substantial piece of accounting, but it could not answer for shopkeepers, customers or passersby. ¹⁰

Murkomen said seven people had been reported missing on Friday, and rescuers had contacted some people beneath the rubble. The figure continued circulating through Saturday. Concern centered on people associated with 11 occupied shops on the ground floor and in the basement. Seven was a reported missing-person count, not an established headcount beneath the concrete. ^{4 10}

The Red Cross figures were less consistent. AL.com’s October 24 account attributed 31 missing-person reports to Kenya Red Cross disaster officer Vincent Ochieng; the Temple Daily Telegram’s AP account that same day carried 21. Both said the reports were still being verified. The difference in scope or cutoff was not explained, so neither figure can safely be presented as the definitive register. ^{4 9}

Separately, the Red Cross said 26 previously missing people had been traced. Their names were not publicly matched to those other registers. Tracing can mean locating somebody safely elsewhere, rather than rescuing them from rubble; some workers may have left before the collapse. Subtracting 26 from 31 to announce five still missing would manufacture certainty from records that have not been reconciled. ^{10 6}

The survivor descriptions require similar restraint. NBC reported a woman rescued; Saturday accounts described a man taken to hospital more than 24 hours after the collapse; ABC’s Sunday broadcast described two people found alive about 24 hours after the building fell. Without matched identities and rescue times, those descriptions cannot simply be added together. The later police-attributed total of four is the strongest supported numerical update. ^{20 5 2 40}

The early medical account also remains incomplete. The Red Cross reported two injured people taken to Kenyatta National Hospital. It is not established how those patients overlap with the injured worker or later survivors, and there is no fresh, verified hospital condition for every rescued person. Two transfers should not become a final injury toll. ^{10 38}

The floors pancaked into a mound of concrete and steel along a busy commercial street. Crews worked toward the lower floors and basement. Residents described calls for help from loved ones beneath the debris, followed by phones becoming unreachable. Losing contact did not establish what had happened to them; it left families with an urgent silence that the official figures could not resolve. ^{24 10 25}

Heavy equipment was initially scarce. One excavator later arrived and began shifting concrete and steel, but subsequent reporting described responders stopping digger use over concerns that excavation could restrict air reaching people below. The BBC, citing Daily Nation, reported that precaution; another account described trapped people saying the machinery was affecting their air supply. These were reported operational concerns, not measured oxygen readings or evidence that machinery had killed anyone. ^{25 12 14}

Rescuers also used sniffer dogs and thermal sensors. The response brought together the Kenya Red Cross, Kenya Defence Forces, Nairobi County emergency teams and National Youth Service. Access became more difficult when people looted neighboring shops and police fired tear gas. Deutsche Welle reported that the episode complicated efforts to clear access for emergency teams, but the reporting does not establish a duration of delay or a resulting casualty. ^{9 10 27 23}

Even basic descriptions of the structure remain unsettled. ABC News’s October 25 broadcast called it 12 storeys; Mehr News Agency’s October 24 report said 18; the BBC that day said it was thought to be 16 or 18. Police described more than ten storeys under construction. None supplies a settled official floor count. The collapse time is approximate too: Euronews carried the Red Cross’s account of about 1:40 p.m. local time, while ABC/AP reporting used about 1 p.m. ^{2 13 12 25 26}

The sharpest regulatory question is why businesses were operating underneath an unfinished high-rise. Governor Johnson Sakaja said the county had approved a change of use for the property, but had not approved the application for a proposed 15-storey building plus basement. He also said the owners lacked the required occupation paperwork. The proposed height describes an application, not necessarily what was standing when the building failed. ^{10 12}

Early Tuko reporting broadly described the building as county-approved but lacking an occupation certificate. A later People Daily account reported Sakaja saying required approvals were missing and dismissing a purported approval document as fake. The fuller distinction matters: permission to change a property’s use is not approval of construction plans, and neither is permission to occupy. The complete approval file has not been established in the available reporting. ^{31 37 45}

The National Construction Authority identified 9th Street Plaza Limited as developer, Stromax Holdings E.A Limited as contractor, Emmanuel Mwangi Maina as architect and Joseph Muturi Mugu as structural engineer. Its reported statement assigned project roles, not responsibility for the collapse. The project was registered in July 2025; that registration does not demonstrate that county construction and occupancy requirements were met. ^{14 30}

The legal accounts remain unresolved. Police commander Issa Mohamud said the owner and anyone who authorized construction could face charges if investigators found criminal negligence. Government spokesperson Charles Owino was separately reported as saying the registered owner and another party were already in custody and charged. The available reporting does not settle who was detained after the collapse or which charges had actually been filed. ^{10 9}

Sakaja also challenged the handling of 14 suspects linked to the building, saying they had been arrested in June and released on 50,000 Kenyan shillings bail without charges. The year of those arrests, their connection to the post-collapse investigation and the supporting court record were not established. His complaint cannot substitute for a finding of responsibility. ⁴⁶

The wider safety problem is documented: FRANCE 24 cited a national tally of 86 building collapses between 2009 and 2019, with an estimated 200 deaths. Those historical figures neither describe Eastleigh’s casualties nor explain this building’s failure. ²¹

Sunday reporting still described search-and-rescue work continuing; the later four-person rescue total did not establish that the operation had ended or that every part of the rubble had been searched. For families, the essential next answer is not another unreconciled number. It is an accounting that connects names to outcomes—people found elsewhere, people rescued, and anyone still missing from the shops and street. ^{2 40}