According to the Kenya Wildlife Service, it was a case of the phantom limb, Kenyans seeing lions roaming the city even where they were none; a reaction to sightings a week earlier.

That was Monday morning, when a motorist reported seeing two lions walk along the fence of the Kenya Forest Service Station on Ngong road on the way to Karen, near the southern bypass junction.

He stopped and informed a guard employed by the Chinese company contracted to construct the bypass.

But when KWS rangers got to the scene, it was clean. “The soil was loose so you’d expect to see paw prints but there were none and after combing the area, we found no lions,” Nairobi National Park Deputy Warden Muraya Githinji told Capital FM News.

“Besides, it’s unlikely that they walked all the way from Lang’ata to Ngong road and only one person saw them.”

On the morning of Friday, February 19 however, it was a different story. Reports of sightings of what popularly came to be known as “the Lang’ata Six” had come flooding in.

From as early as 1am, a motorist reported witnessing four lionesses cross Lang’ata road and many others, presumably on their way to work, reported seeing between two and four lionesses.