Only one person out of the seven indicted last year in Kenya on charges of trafficking 1.1 metric tons of cocaine has been found guilty. Nairobi Chief Magistrate, Aggrey Mucheluloe, ruled Wednesday that only Kenyan businessman David Mugo Kiragu was guilty. Kiragu, who will appeal, was sentenced to 30 years in prison and also given a $270,000 fine.
The cocaine, which was found by police in the capital, Nairobi, and a coastal town, Malindi, at the end of 2004, was on its way to Europe where the chief suspect in the case, Kiragu’s old brother, George, is serving a jail term on a drug charge; Kenyan authorities still wish to extradite him.
The five other defendants - a sixth was acquitted earlier - were found not guilty and released, much to the chagrin of the prosecution team who are considering an appeal. Two of the defendants, an Italian couple, Ricci Angello and Estella Duminga Furuli, had rented out their villa in the coastal town of Malindi to Kiragu and it was in their house that some of the drugs were found. Mucheluloe said they were not connected to the drugs operation. Upon Ricci’s return to the luxurious villa he discovered that tens of thousands of dollars worth of household property had been stolen even though it was supposed to be under police guard. He plans to sue for compensation.
While Mucheluloe thought the verdict and sentence passed should improve Kenya’s currently poor reputation for fighting drug smuggling, the CNN news report on the trial editorialised the opposite:
The acquittals in a case that put the east African country on the map as a transit point for drugs bound for Europe are likely to raise questions about its ability to fight smuggling. Foreign governments have long complained that Kenya’s police and prosecutors do not cooperate closely enough.
There had been much fretting in Kenya earlier this year over the fate of the shipment of cocaine said to be worth around $88 million. The United Nations and others within Kenya wanted the haul destroyed to avoid any of it being stolen, which had already been rumoured to be the case. The police denied these reports. It was eventually burned in March on the orders of Mucheluloe.
