The heir to one of Kenya’s biggest white-owned estates was charged on Thursday with the murder of a game warden on the family’s Rift Valley farm.
Thomas Cholmondeley (37) scion of the most prominent British settler family in Kenya, pleaded not guilty to the fatal shooting of a plainclothes warden.
Police claim that Cholmondeley opened fire with a Luger pistol on a Kenya Wildlife Service warden, Simon Ole Stima, who was sitting in an unmarked car while two of his colleagues investigated a farm slaughterhouse suspected of preparing illegal game meat.
The wardens had detained a number of workers on the 40 000ha Soysambu farm for skinning the carcass of a buffalo, authorities said. Last Thursday 16 of the estate’s workers were charged with possession of game trophies.
Hunting in Kenya is illegal but some private ranchers can cull wild animals on their ranches.
At Nakuru court, judge Muga Apondi said he would set a trial date on May 6.
Cholmondeley, a father of two and finance director of his father’s beef and dairy farms, is a Kenyan national and great-grandson of Hugh Cholmondeley, the third Baron Delamere, who settled in the valley in 1903. His grandfather, the fourth baron, was part of the hedonistic Happy Valley set of aristocratic playboys.
The murdered warden was a Masai, and the case has stirred up fresh tension between white landowners and the Masai, who are campaigning to reclaim land occupied by white settlers in the colonial era. – Guardian Unlimited Â