A British aristocrat who escaped murder charges in Kenya after killing a game warden on his family’s ranch last year shot another man to death on the premises on Wednesday, police said.
Thomas Cholmondeley, son of the Fifth Baron Delamere and great-grandson of Kenya’s most prominent early British settler, told authorities he fired at a suspected poacher on the ranch in the central Rift Valley, they said.
The as-yet unidentified man died of his wounds en route to a hospital just over a year after Cholmondeley shot and killed an undercover Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) officer on the 40 468ha Delamere estate.
”Tom claims the man was a poacher who was slaughtering a wild animal on his farm when he shot him deep in the bush,” Naivasha police commander Simon Kiragu told Agence France-Presse, adding that Cholmondeley had admitted to using an assault rifle.
”Police are on the ground and conducting investigations into the shooting,” he said from Naivasha, about 90km north-west of Nairobi, declining further comment except to say that no arrests had yet been made.
The shooting is likely to spark major controversy in the Rift Valley where resentment over the dropping of murder charges against Cholmondeley last year still runs high among the region’s indigenous Maasai community.
On April 19 last year, Cholmondeley (48) shot and killed KWS ranger Simon Ole Sasina, a Maasai, who had gone to the Delamere’s Soysambu ranch to investigate charges it was involved in the illegal bushmeat trade.
He admitted to the shooting but insisted he acted in self defence and after initially being charged with murder, prosecutors dropped the case, prompting nationwide outrage and mass protests by members of the Maasai tribe.
At the time, some Maasai threatened to attack the Delamere ranch and other European-owned farms in the region that was once known as ”Happy Valley” for its eccentric, decadent and often controversial colonial-era residents.
A commission of inquiry formed after the charge was dropped has yet to deliver a ruling in the matter that ripped open festering resentments and highlighted growing security fears among expatriates, at least four of whom have been killed in apparent robberies in the Rift Valley since 2004.
Cholomondeley’s case has receieved particular attention due to his family history. His great-grandfather Hugh was a major player in the British colonisation of Kenya in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
His grandfather achieved notoriety in 1955 when he married Diana Broughton, the central figure in the murder of her lover, Josslyn Hay, the 22nd Earl of Errol, on the outskirts of Nairobi in 1941.
Diana’s first husband, Jock Broughton, was tried for the murder but acquitted. The saga was recounted by James Fox in his book White Mischief, which was later filmed by Michael Radford. – Sapa-AFP