Aristo stands trial for murdering a poacher

[David Guyatt]

Good to see that the British ruling class have not all lost their sense of moral indignation and their baronial right to mete out of on the spot justice.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/6915876.stm

Aristocrat has 'case to answer'

A white Kenyan aristocrat accused of murdering a man who had been poaching on his estate has a case to answer, a court has ruled.
Thomas Cholmondeley, 38, a descendant of white settler Lord Delamere, denies the murder of 37-year-old Robert Njoya.


Old Etonian Mr Cholmondeley could face the death penalty if convicted

The court has heard from 38 prosecution witnesses since it opened in September.

Under the Kenyan system judges can end the trial at that point if there is insufficient evidence, but in this case have ruled the defence should go ahead.

Defence lawyers for Mr Cholmondley, who faces the death penalty if convicted, are due to call seven witnesses.

He has already said he shot the poacher in self-defence, telling police after his arrest the man had three companions and a pack of dogs and he suspected them of poaching a gazelle.

He said he shot at the group after they set their dogs on him, hitting the man - who died later on the way to hospital - and killing two dogs.

Second murder case

It is the second murder charge divorced father-of-two Mr Cholmondeley has faced.

In 2005 he admitted shooting another man - Maasai ranger Samson Ole Sisina - but said he acted in self-defence, mistaking the warden for an armed robber.

The case was dropped due to insufficient evidence and his release prompted national outrage and mass protests from Maasais.

Opening the latest trial last year Keriako Tobiko, Kenya's director of public prosecutions, dismissed claims Mr Cholmondeley feared for his safety when he killed Mr Njoya.

"The accused attacked the deceased and his companions as retaliation or revenge for trespassing and poaching," he told the court.

The trial later heard that the shooting took place after a spate of armed robberies on Mr Cholmondeley's estate.

Ranch manager Koigi Kahugia told the Nairobi trial that the farm's managing director was shot in a hold-up and two other managers were robbed at gunpoint.

Spear

Mr Cholmondeley had driven the dying man to hospital, the court also heard.

Witness Karl Tundo said he had been walking through dense bush, a few metres behind the defendant, when he had heard voices and then three or four shots in quick succession.

Mr Tundo said: "Tom [Mr Cholmondeley] shouted at me to go and get the car because he had hit someone by mistake."

Another witness, Peter Gichuhi, said he was among poachers accompanying Mr Njoya.

At one point he admitted he had lied under oath to the court when he said he had not been carrying a spear.

He said he and two other poachers had walked deep into the estate when suddenly shots rang out.

Mr Gichuhi said he dropped a large blade and a Thomson's Gazelle that they had found trapped in a snare and fled on foot, but never saw Mr Njoya alive again.

[Magda Hassan]

White Kenyan aristocrat who killed black poacher on family estate released from prison eight months after sentencing



By Mail Foreign Service


Freed: Thomas Cholmondeley


One of Kenya's most prominent white aristocrats was released from prison today after more than three years in jail for killing a black poacher on his vast family estate.
Thomas Cholmondeley, jailed since the 2006 shooting, was sentenced to eight months in prison earlier this year for manslaughter in the death of 37-year-old Robert Njoya.
The judge had reduced the charge from murder, saying he believed Cholmondeley's attempts to give Njoya first aid helped prove that he accidentally shot the poacher.
Njoya's death was the second time in just over a year that Cholmondeley had shot and killed a black man on his largely ungated farm. The first shooting did not come to trial, sparking protests from locals who said there had been high-level government intervention in the case.
Grievances raised by the case reach far beyond the Cholmondeley family. Some Kenyans resent all white farmers as symbols of the British colonists who stole land from local tribes.

Cholmondeley's long-term partner Sally Dudmesh is comforted by friends at his May sentencing


After independence in 1963, Britain funded a scheme to transfer some of that land into African hands. Most of the land, however, was taken by powerful local politicians, forcing the original inhabitants to disperse to other, already crowded areas.
That injustice still rankles - and it contributed to bloody tribal clashes sparked by Kenya's disputed 2007 election, when politicians resurrected the issue to mobilize their supporters against political rivals.

More than 1,000 people were killed, many of them slum dwellers hacked or bludgeoned to death in the lake-studded Rift Valley where the Cholmondeley estate lies.
Cholmondeley was educated at Eton, one of Britain's most exclusive schools, and is the great-grandson of the third Baron Delamere, one of Kenya's first important white settlers more than a century ago.
The trial also evoked memories of the fourth Baron Delamere, Cholmondeley's grandfather. He was the fourth husband of socialite Diana Broughton.

Broughton's lover was shot in the head on the outskirts of Nairobi in the 1940s and her second husband, Jock Broughton, was tried and acquitted.
The episode inspired a book and a 1987 film, both called 'White Mischief', which highlighted the adulterous, alcoholic lives of some of Kenya's early colonialists.

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