After a three-month break the trial of a British aristocrat charged with murder in the shooting of a trespasser on his ancestral ranch resumed in Nairobi on Wednesday.
Thomas Cholmondeley, son of the fifth Baron Delamere and great-grandson of Kenya’s most prominent early settler, is charged with killing poacher Robert Njoya in May 2006.
So far, the prosecution has called for 30 witnesses in the trial, in which Cholmondeley faces a death sentence if convicted, although Kenya has not carried out a death sentence since 1987.
”We have five substantive witnesses … It is our intention and desire to conclude the prosecution case by the end of next week,” chief prosecutor Keriako Tobiko told the court.
Cholmondeley, who in 2005 escaped murder charges over the killing of another Kenyan on his property, about 90km north-west of Nairobi, has pleaded not guilty in a case that has torn open old colonial-era wounds.
He says he accidentally shot Njoya after being threatened by men on the Delameres’ Soysambu ranch in the Rift Valley, where crime against Europeans has been on the rise.
But prosecutors say Cholmondeley intentionally shot Njoya while he was running away and then tried to cover up the crime by tampering with evidence at the scene.
Cholmondeley’s cases have received particular attention because of his family history.
His great-grandfather, the third Baron Delamere, was a key player in Britain’s colonisation of Kenya, overseeing the settlement of the so-called ”white highlands”.
His grandfather achieved notoriety in 1955 when he married Diana Broughton, a central figure in the murder of her lover, Josslyn Hay, the 22nd Earl of Errol.
Diana’s first husband, Jock Broughton, was tried for the murder, which took place on the outskirts of Nairobi in 1941, but was acquitted in a sensational trial that rocked what was then British East Africa.
The saga was recounted by James Fox in his book White Mischief, which was later made into a film. — Sapa-AFP