The Kenya Red Cross opened a family tracing desk at the rubble line on 9th Street in Eastleigh on Friday night after an 18-storey building under construction collapsed at about 1:40 p.m., leaving seven people unaccounted for even though every worker on the upper floors had been located.
Interior Cabinet Secretary Kipchumba Murkomen told reporters at the scene that rescue teams had made radio contact with some people still trapped in the concrete stack, while Nairobi police commander Issa Mohamud promised criminal charges once investigators determine who authorised work on a tower that had no occupation certificate yet housed shops on its basement and ground levels.
What collapsed, and who is still missing
Witnesses and aerial images showed more than a dozen floors compressed into a thin slab of debris along one of Nairobi’s densest commercial corridors. The Associated Press reported that an electronics shop, a butchery and a grocery had been operating on the lower levels, with Murkomen saying about 11 occupied shop spaces sat below the rising structure.
Those traders and customers are at the centre of the overnight count. Murkomen said seven people remained missing late Friday, separate from the construction roster that Nairobi County and national agencies had already reconciled. Kenya Red Cross later said 26 people who had been reported missing earlier were traced and accounted for, while two injured survivors were taken to Kenyatta National Hospital.
Governor Johnson Sakaja, visiting the site, said the project had not followed county construction guidelines and that Nairobi would pursue legal action against those responsible. Mohamud said owners and anyone who signed off on the build would face charges if negligence is proved, but only after what he described as a thorough investigation.
Multi-agency rescue and the tracing desk
Murkomen said Kenya Defence Forces engineers, National Police Service units, Nairobi County disaster teams, the National Youth Service and Red Cross volunteers were sharing heavy equipment and listening devices through the night. Al Jazeera quoted him saying contact had been made with survivors still inside, without publishing names or a precise count of those conversations.
The Red Cross asked families searching for relatives to use its toll-free line, 1199, and to register at the on-site tracing desk rather than crowding the unstable pile. Humanitarian staff said the desk would stay open as long as search operations continued, pairing names from shop tenants with witness accounts from the street market.
Political pressure on building oversight
Eastleigh’s mix of informal commerce and fast vertical construction has been a recurring flashpoint in Kenyan politics, and Friday’s collapse revived demands for stronger county enforcement. Sakaja’s statement that the tower was out of compliance puts his administration on the hook to show which inspections were missed, while Murkomen’s national security briefings signal that the Interior ministry will treat any confirmed shortcuts as a criminal matter rather than a purely regulatory fine.
Officials have not named the developer or the exact permit status of floors above the retail level. Rescue leaders said their immediate priority was voids in the pancake collapse where voices had been heard; tracing desk staff said their parallel job was to shrink the list of seven missing as shopkeepers and families check in from other neighbourhoods.
With psychosocial teams being arranged for affected families, the political test into Saturday is whether contact with trapped survivors converts into live extractions — and whether Nairobi can document how an occupied ground floor was allowed to stay open under an unfinished 18-storey shell.