It has been a year since Moritz Wagner (56) and his daughter Aluna (16) turned their backs on Kenya and moved to Hamburg. They searched in vain for Farrah, Moritz's wife and Aluna's mother. Moritz's strenuous, sometimes traumatic job as a war photographer had put a strain on their marriage: Farrah had taken time off, from which she never returned.

Now news reaches Moritz from the Kenyan police that his wife has been recovered dead from her car in Kenya. Shortly after, Farrah's sister Pascale suggests that Farrah was not the victim of an accident, but was murdered. Moritz sets off for Kenya. But when he goes to meet his sister-in-law, she lies in her house with life-threatening stab wounds and dies before his eyes. For lack of witnesses, Moritz is now considered a suspect and has to justify himself to the Kenyan police and flee. But what did Pascale want to tell Moritz with her last words "goblin Farrah"? 

Together with Caroline, a shirt-sleeved used car saleswoman and good friend of Farrah, Moritz sets out to find the secret behind Farrah's death. The trail leads the two to the Congo. But why did his wife travel to the Congo shortly before her disappearance to visit a young prospector who toils under inhumane conditions in one of the many cobalt mines? What do Congolese politician Benjamin Mudimbe and a mysterious "captain" have to do with Farrah's death? And what does all this have to do with a photo Moritz took a few years ago of a drowned African boy?

"Death in Mombasa" is a production by Zeitsprung Pictures in cooperation with avriofilms for the ZDF.