Category: Justice

Above: Kenyan Children’s Department official holds the baby who was abducted en route to Juba, South Sudan last year.

A Kenyan baby stolen from its mother just four days after birth returned to the country Friday after a court ordered that he be brought back.

The boy who was in the company of Kenya Mission in South Sudan and Children’s Department officials remained playful, at one time grabbing a journalist’s microphone, but his parents are yet to be identified.

The baby looked healthy. He had been in the custody of the Kenyan Embassy for four months, before he was finally flown in.

His story begun on September 30 when a woman in her forties boarded a Simba Coach bus destined for Juba in from Nairobi.

The woman, who has since been jailed for child abduction, took on the bus indicating that she was the real mother of the infant.

But in a road journey that takes more than 20 hours, the cat was always going to get out of its bag.

The abductor passed through Kenya-Uganda border but got arrested after crossing into Uganda-South Sudan borders without notice.

CRYING BABY

The baby had been crying. The passengers got concerned that despite the yelling, the mother was neither feeding it nor cuddling it to calm down.

The following day at the Namule border point in South Sudan, the passengers notified the police who questioned the woman. Here is when she started speaking from two sides of her mouth.

“She initially said she was the mother, but later she changed saying she had only been given the baby to bring to South Sudan. Through the South Sudanese authorities, we arrested two other women, one woman from Kenya and another South Sudanese national,” Lawrence Chemonges, the Foreign Affairs Senior Assistant Secretary for Diaspora service told reporters at the airport.

The ministry had been notified of the incident in October, but relied on South Sudanese authorities to trace the woman’s movements. It appears her phone records helped.

“The passengers in the bus had suspected that the child is stolen because the baby had been crying all the way from Nairobi and she was not breastfeeding him,” a dispatch from the Kenyan Embassy in Juba describes how the Mission got wind of the information.

One Kenyan woman on the bus who had talked to her later called the Mission in Juba to report the incident.

According to the narrative, when they asked her why she was neither cuddling nor breastfeeding the baby, she told them she had only adopted it.

It is a curious incident given that normally, an adult travelling in the company of a minor across the borders must declare the identity of the child.

Foreign Affairs could not determine whether she had declared her details at the Kenyan border.

Border officials later demanded that her breasts be checked to determine if she had breastfed at all. It is from here that they updated their National Security agencies in Juba.

The Mission further updated Nairobi that the suspect, only identified as Hellen Syokau, had initially indicated that she was from Tanzania before her identification documents betrayed her.

“She informed the passengers that she was from Tanzania but upon producing her documents, they found out that she is from Kenya, Eastern Province and Kamba by Tribe.”

The baby now identified as Marua Munene alias Baby Lucky Juba, though his real name is yet to be known, was returned to Nairobi by Kenyan Foreign Affairs officials following a court order in Juba that the baby be brought back.

ABDUCTORS JAILED

According to the Embassy, the baby’s three would-be abductors have since been jailed with the Kenyan getting a year behind bars for abduction and trafficking.

Foreign Affairs declined to identify the other Kenyan woman and her south Sudanese accomplice saying further investigation was going on.

“We still don’t know the baby’s parents because there was no identification or birth certificate on the woman. We managed to trace other suspects using the woman’s previous telephone calls and she later admitted to have stolen the baby in Kenya,” Mr John Mariera, the Secretary in the Kenyan Mission in Juba said.

Foreign Affairs could not name the children’s home the baby will be hosted, but have asked anyone who lost a baby of this age to report the matter to the police or contact the ministry urgently.

National

A court in the Democratic Republic of Congo has imposed a life sentence on a British former soldier for killing a fellow convict in jail last year.

Joshua French, who is already on death row, denied killing Norwegian Tjostolv Moland in the cell they shared.

The men had both received death sentences in 2009 for spying and the killing of their Congolese driver – charges which they denied.

The UK Foreign Office said it was “very concerned about Mr French’s welfare”.

A spokesman said the government would continue to make the “appropriate representations” to the DRC authorities about Mr French’s case.

“We remain very concerned about Mr French’s welfare and will continue to provide full consular assistance at this difficult time, especially as he continues to face the death penalty following his previous conviction,” the spokesman said.

Legal charity Reprieve said Mr French had been suffering from “severe mental illness” throughout his trial.

Maya Foa said: “He is acutely psychotic and should never have been put on trial – his best friend’s death was proven to be suicide.

“The UK government must do everything they can to get him transferred to a hospital where he can receive the medical attention he so desperately needs.”

Ambush claim

Mr Moland was found dead in prison last August.

He had worked with the Norwegian military until 2007, at which point he and Mr French started working for private security companies in Africa.

They claimed they were in DR Congo to research setting up their own security company.

The men said they had hired Abedi Kasongo as a driver after their motorbike broke down, and that he was killed when they were ambushed by gunmen in the jungle.

Their original convictions were overturned by a high military court in early 2010, before a new panel of judges convicted them in a retrial later the same year.

The Norwegian government, which denied that the men had been spying for Norway, asked the Congolese authorities to allow them to serve their sentences in Norway.

A joint UK-Norwegian national, Mr French was born in Norway to a British father and Norwegian mother, and lived in Margate, Kent, as a child.

He moved back to Norway when his parents divorced, but returned to the UK aged 20 and served in the British army’s Parachute Regiment.

wirestory

Four Somali men charged in Kenya in connection with a blast last month at the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (JKIA) were denied bail on Wednesday after the country’s top prosecutor appealed a lower court’s decision to release them.

A magistrate ruled that the four could be bailed if they paid a bond of Sh20 million each, but the Director of Public Prosecutions Keriako Tobiko made a fast-track application to the High Court to have the bail decision overturned.

High Court judge Msagha Mbogholi ordered the suspension of the decision to grant bail, until Tobiko’s application could be heard in full.

The explosion took place on January 16 at a cafe adjacent to one of the terminal buildings in JKIA, the region’s busiest transport hub. There were no casualties.

Police initially played down the incident, insisting a “loose light bulb” had fallen into a waste paper basket.

After a bullet-ridden car containing a dead body and explosives was found the following morning at a housing estate near the airport, they were obliged to change their story.

Hassan Abdi Mohamed, Mohamed Osman Ali, Yusuf Warsame and Garad Hassan Fer were charged a week ago with being behind the attack.

Leonard Bwire, an officer with the police anti-terrorism unit, said the four had acquired Kenyan passports illegally.

Since Kenya sent troops into southern Somalia in October 2011 to help fight the Al-Qaeda-linked Shabaab insurgents, it has been hit by a series of attacks.

The Shabaab claimed last September’s attack on Nairobi’s Westgate mall, in which at least 67 people were killed.

Grenades have been hurled into restaurants in crowded areas in Nairobi as well as on the popular tourist Indian Ocean coast, and the remote northeast region bordering Somalia has seen a string of attacks.

capitalfm

The Kenya government’s official submissions at The Hague Thursday regarding a demand for President Uhuru Kenyatta’s financial transaction records may hold the key to the closure of his case at the International Criminal Court.

On Thursday, Attorney General Githu Muigai will seek to convince the ICC bench why the Government of Kenya has declined to comply with the Prosecution request to release Uhuru’s financial records.

He is expected to argue that the Banking Act prohibits the Central Bank of Kenya from publishing information that discloses financial affairs of any person unless the consent of that person has been secured in writing.

Prof Muigai will also argue that the Prosecution request is untenable as it violates the Rome Statute, Rules of Procedure and Evidence and disregards the International Crimes Act.

“The prosecution’s request for such information in full awareness of the conditions under which it may be sought and the process preceding it and with the knowledge that this would be in breach of Article 93 of the Statute and hence illegal, is malicious and an attempt to subvert the process of justice by whatever means possible,” said the AG in an earlier submission, pointing to his line of argument tomorrow.

Prof Muigai will also dwell on the role of the President vis-a-vis other constitutional bodies concerning the issue of co-operation and also outline the doctrine of separation of powers and independence of various organs of government.

But Bensouda argues that there is no domestic law that deters the government from acting on the request.

“Despite the GoK’s suggestion that information in the records requested cannot be provided without violating the rights of the concerned persons, legal avenues do exist under Kenyan law, likely involving judicial oversight from a domestic court,” she says.

However, Bensouda has insisted that withdrawing the charges “would reward the accused, who heads a Government that has obstructed the court’s work, and who is in a position to ensure that the GoK compiles with its treaty obligations.”

“The parties, the Legal Representative for Victims and a representative of the Kenya Government, are invited to attend. The discussion will, in principle, take place in public session,” the three-judge Bench said as they scheduled tomorrow’s meeting.

standard

Deputy President William Ruto’s lawyer Karim Khan has asked prosecution witnesses in the case at the International Criminal Court (ICC) not to pull out but to testify truthfully.

“I don’t want witnesses just to hide under the carpet. And I’m saying this not only as lead counsel for the defence of His Excellency William Ruto but on the instructions of his Excellency William Ruto himself,” Khan said on a visit to Kenya on Tuesday.

Khan said they should not be afraid to testify because they received inducement to sign up as prosecution witnesses as the real crime was giving false testimony on the stand.

“Even if they say foreign agents like USAID have pushed certain stories, fed them certain stories or encouraged them to tell certain lies, let them come to the court and reveal the truth behind this case,” he encouraged.

Such admissions, Khan continued to say, would act as further proof of the shoddy investigations and external influence on the Office of The Prosecutor.

“That’s what we want to be presented to the judges and that’s what the victims of this post-election violence deserve. The Kenyan electorate have a right to the truth,” he argued.

And to this end, he said he plans on applying for former ICC Prosecutor Louis Moreno Ocampo – who first pursued the Kenyan cases at the ICC – to be called as a witness.

“He was the ultimate boss of that office. He was the person who directed everybody else and I think it’s relevant to this case. It’s not seeking simply to drag a personality and put them in a witness box. But I think there’s a legitimate forensic necessity for the judges to hear how lamentable the investigations in this case were,” he said.

In a rare interview on the Kenyan cases with Radio Netherlands Worldwide recently, Ocampo admitted that there were diplomats who asked him to stop President Uhuru Kenyatta and Deputy President William Ruto from contesting in the 2013 General Election.

“There were some diplomats asking me to do something more to prevent Kenyatta or Ruto to compete for the elections,” he said during the interview.

On Monday, witness P0323 – David Kiarie Kibe – said he could not in good conscience testify against Ruto as he had been induced by USAID.

It’s due to the increasing number of witness withdrawals that the ICC prosecution has applied for these renegade witnesses to be compelled to testify.

An application Khan is opposed to, despite urging the witnesses to testify.

“On Valentine’s day we’re all going to be busy in court. The trial chamber has asked for oral arguments on that. We say there’s no such power. Witnesses must come voluntarily,” he said.

Khan said they should not be afraid to testify because they received inducement to sign up as prosecution witnesses as the real crime was giving false testimony on the stand

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