The Associated Press has put out an article about how Kenya has recently been cited by officials from the United States, the United Kingdom and the United Nations as increasingly becoming a cocaine distribution hub, after formerly being more known as a “backwater producer of marijuana and hashish”. The U.S. State Department’s 2006 drug control strategy report was quoted as saying that “[i]nternational drug trafficking rings have made inroads in Kenya and may benefit from a climate of official corruption, which allows them to operate with near impunity”.
This won’t be news to regular readers of Rehabology.com, but I thought I’d put up some links to one specific news story mentioned in the report in case you missed them the first time around, namely the seizure in 2004 of 1.1 metric tons of cocaine from a beach house. Only one out of seven defendants, businessman David Kiragu, was found guilty in the subsequent drug trafficking court case. Kiragu’s mother, for one, thought he was not guilty, although former colleagues and friends did notice that he had recently begun to throw around a lot more cash than before and that some of them has been hired to offload boxes from speedboats at the beach property.
Former chief prosecutor Philip Murgor, who was the target of severe criticism because of several high-profile prosecutions he undertook, has claimed he was fired in May 2005 because he wanted a “transparent investigation” into the case; he wrote a column slamming the investigation. The current prosecutor J-Oriri Onyango responded with equal fervour.