Kenyan prosecutors on Monday said a local priest plotted the murder of a septuagenarian Italian bishop in northern Kenya last year in a row over cash donated to the diocese from well-wishers.
The accusation came as the prosecution opened its case in the trial of the Father Waqo Guyo Malley and five others, who are alleged to have shot and killed 77-year-old Bishop Luigi Locati in the Isiolo diocese he founded four decades ago.
”We will show that Father Malley was the mastermind of the plan to murder the deceased,” lead prosecutor Jacob Ondari told the High Court in Nairobi, where the high-profile trial is being heard.
”There was very bad blood between the deceased and the priest,” he said. ”We will also show that this animosity emanated from donor funds which were being channelled through the diocese, which [Malley] wanted to receive directly.”
Malley, along with co-defendants Mohammed Molu Bagajo, Aden Ibrahim Mohammed, Mahati Ali Halake, Roba Balla Barichi and Mohammed Dika Wario, all face capital murder charges in connection with Locati’s July 14 2005 slaying.
All six have pleaded not guilty to the murder, which shocked and outraged many Kenyans, not least in the Isiolo diocese, about 200km north of Nairobi, where Locati had founded a parish church in 1963.
The men were arrested and charged in September but the trial, which was set to begin in December, has been hit with numerous delays, including an allegation of police torture by one suspect, and failed to get started until Monday.
The trial is set to resume on Tuesday.
The popular Locati was slain at the church compound in Isiolo in what police say was a power struggle for control of the diocese and money it collected from supporters around the world as the bishop prepared to retire.
A native of Vinzaglio in the northern Italian province of Vercelli, he was ordained a priest in 1952 and came to Kenya 10 years later.
More than a thousand people, including President Mwai Kibaki, attended his funeral in Isiolo and Pope Benedict XVI expressed his sadness. — AFP
