A Kenyan court on Wednesday charged a British aristocrat with murder in the fatal shooting of a trespasser on his ancestral ranch, the second killing he has been accused of in the past year.
In a case that has reopened festering colonial-era resentments in Kenya’s central Rift Valley, Thomas Cholmondeley, a scion of one of Britain’s earliest settler families, pleaded innocent to the charge.
”Not true,” he replied when read the charge by High Court Justice Muga Apondi in Nairobi where the case has been moved because of widespread popular anger over the slaying of Robert Njoya in the Rift Valley.
Cholmondeley, son of the fifth Baron Delamere and great-grandson of Kenya’s most prominent early British settler, has told police he shot Njoya after confronting him and several other suspected poachers on his property on May 10.
He maintains that Njoya (37) and his companions threatened him with dogs and that he shot the victim, who later died of his wounds, to defend himself.
Njoya died of his wounds en route to hospital.
The murder charge is the second Cholmondeley, a 38-year-old Kenyan citizen, has faced in the last 13 months.
Last year he escaped murder charges after shooting dead a Kenya Wildlife Service ranger on his family’s vast 40 500Ha Soysambu ranch, the same property on which Njoya was slain.
The charge was dropped for lack of evidence after he claimed to have shot the armed undercover ranger in self-defence, prompting widespread protests against the government.
That anger has now increased and some Kenyans, including government officials, have threatened to take the law into their own hands if Cholmondeley is not convicted this time and called for expulsion of white settlers.
The two killings have reignited more than a century of resentment between black Africans and white settlers, mainly of British origin, and some Kenyans have argued the country should adopt Zimbabwe-style land reforms. — AFP
