UPDATE / MURDER MYSTERY : Who Killed Kenya’s Foreign Minister? : Despite the suspicions, Scotland Yard’s report may never be made public.

The year’s most compelling political mystery in Kenya--who killed Foreign Minister Robert J. Ouko?--has been supplanted in recent weeks by an even stranger conundrum:

Will Scotland Yard’s investigation of the homicide ever see the light of day?

Detectives from London’s Metropolitan Police, the Commonwealth’s leading police agency, spent four months in Kenya this year investigating Ouko’s death at the request of the Kenyan government, which sensed that the crime was so politically charged that no investigation by domestic police would have any public credibility.

But now that the Yard has finished its work, the Kenyan government is acting as if it does not want to hear the result.

Ouko’s broken and burned body was found near his home in western Kenya on Feb. 16, three days after he disappeared from his house. He had reportedly been hauled away in the middle of the night in a mysterious white limousine.

Emotional memorial services in Nairobi and his home city of Kisumu led to two days of rioting by demonstrators who suggested that he was assassinated by members of the government of President Daniel Arap Moi and that Moi was trying to cover up the crime.

Since then, public suspicions about his death have merged with general discontent over Kenya’s one-party politics to create the most politically unsettled period here since Moi quashed a one-day coup attempt in 1982.

Mistrust over a possible political backdrop to Ouko’s killing has intensified because for weeks the government has been engaged in a dispute with Scotland Yard and the British Foreign Office about, of all things, how the report is to be formally transmitted.

The sideshow erupted last week, when Kenya’s attorney general, Matthew G. Muli, said he would not accept the report unless it was personally handed to him in Nairobi by Detective Supt. John Troon, who headed the Scotland Yard team and who left Kenya months ago. For it to be delivered any other way, Muli insisted, would be “unethical and unprecedented.”

Troon is retiring next week.

Muli rejected all alternatives, including receiving the report from the British ambassador via diplomatic pouch.

The Kenyan government has also made clear that if and when it does get its hands on the report, it does not intend to immediately make it public. Ouko’s successor as foreign minister, Wilson N. Ayah, said last week that “the Scotland Yard report is part of the Kenya police investigation. . . . It is not the kind of report that is given to the press for mass circulation.”

Kenya’s evident intention to stand on ceremony has encouraged speculation. Two British newspapers have suggested that it accuses high Cabinet officials, although perhaps not by name, of complicity in the slaying. Neither paper claimed to have actually seen the report.

If those suggestions are true, the report would be a political bombshell, given the growing dissatisfaction with the Moi government, particularly among members of the large Kikuyu and Luo tribes. Ouko was a Luo. Moi has never before been associated with assassination as a political tool--unlike his predecessor, Jomo Kenyatta.

Some political observers in Nairobi believe that the government is trying to stall delivery of the report in the hope that public interest in the case will eventually wane.

“They’re playing for time,” remarked Gitobu Imanyara, a recent political detainee who is editor of the feisty Nairobi Law Monthly and a leading government critic.

Ouko’s death has cast a long shadow over Kenyan politics this year. The urbane foreign minister was one of the country’s fastest-rising politicos until he accompanied President Moi on a quasi-official visit to Washington in January. The two men apparently had a serious falling-out during the trip. The particulars, which are subject to much speculation here, are unknown.