The Kenyan government was this week poised to reinvestigate the murder of British woman Julie Ward after admitting that her death was part of its ”dark and ugly” past.
In a dramatic intervention during an inquest held in Britain 16 years after Ward’s death, the Kenyan government admitted there had been ”deliberate obstruction” of her father’s attempts to discover how she died on the Masai Mara game reserve.
Calling the murder ”one of the great unsolved mysteries” of former president Daniel arap Moi’s regime, the Kenyan Minister for Justice and Constitutional Affairs, Kiraitu Murungi, acknowledged rumours in Africa that the son of the former president was involved in Ward’s murder.
Murungi said in a statement read out at the inquest: ”Should any new evidence be unearthed, the government will take all the necessary steps to bring the culprits, irrespective of their status in society, to book.”
The statement was welcomed by Ward’s father, John, who has spent about £1-million campaigning to bring his daughter’s killers to justice.
Murungi, whose government has reopened inquests into two other mysterious deaths in the country, said the Kenyan authorities did not ”adequately respond” to Ward’s efforts to investigate his daughter’s death.
The Kenyan authorities initially claimed that Julie Ward had been killed by wild animals and a post-mortem examination was doctored to suggest this.
An inquest in Kenya later recorded a verdict of unlawful killing, but two trials failed to establish who murdered her.
The murder has had a dramatic effect on the number of tourists travelling to Kenya. The Masai Mara game reserve once received two million visitors a year. Now, just 200 000 travellers visit it.
The inquest was called after police in the eastern English county of Lincolnshire were asked to investigate Ward’s allegation of an unwitting or deliberate conspiracy between London’s Metropolitan police, the UK Foreign Office and the Kenyan authorities to not fully investigate Ward’s murder. — Â