Post by miguna on Jan 2, 2006 4:02:41 GMT 3
That is the question for Kibaki, his gvt and his apologists. Plus a few comments from his critics. Let's go...
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Sunday January 1, 2006
Cocaine haul
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By Otsieno Namwaya
The Kenya Government, and the police in particular, are again in the spotlight from the international community over the handling of drug hauls transiting through or destined for the country.
The events leading to the two separate seizures of cocaine consignments totalling over Sh8 billion slightly more than a year ago still intrigue Western powers determined to crush the global drug syndicate. One such seizure was done in Malindi in the full glare of the media on December 14, 2004.
The drug-busters think that for a cartel to feel confident enough to ferry consignments of cocaine worth billions of shillings at one go — which the cartels are always careful not to do — it must have been assured of protection from very senior people in government.
Besides, the containers with cocaine had reportedly been shipped into the country in March 2004 and by the time the drugs were "discovered" in December, part of the consignment had already reached the Netherlands.
While Kenyan authorities categorically deny ever assuring drug traffickers of security, the incidence of drug use has not reduced in the last one year raising fears that some impounded drug hauls may have found their way back into the market.
"There is anxiety in the country right now about (past) cocaine hauls. The main complaint is that the exhibits are recycling in the market; some have been detected in parts of Nairobi and Mombasa," says Joseph Kaguthi, the national coordinator of the National Agency for the Campaign Against Drug Abuse.
Since the seizure of the cocaine, he says, the supply of the drug to Kenyan consumers has increased, forcing the prices down to Sh150 per sachet, reputedly the lowest ever.
What worries the international community more is the fact that samples of the cocaine seized here were found in London when Kenya Airways employees were arrested early 2005 raising troubling questions on whether that specific cocaine is intact.
In the eyes of the international community, says Kaguthi, Kenya has now risen from a mere transit point for drug traffickers to a destination and storage point. This, he says, threatens the image of the country internationally.
Amid perceptions that there is complicity among senior government officials in the war against drug trafficking, junior police who try their best to expose the crime meet many roadblocks on the way.
"European diplomats have indicated to the Kenya government that they remain deeply concerned about the continuing level of drug trafficking in the country as evidenced by recent seizures at the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport," said a Nairobi-based diplomat of a European Union country who declined to be named.
When dismissing one of the cocaine cases last November, a magistrate blamed police for poor investigations and inadequate evidence.
But the police insist they are doing their best and have kept abreast with the new tactics drug traffickers are employing to ferry drugs such as use of couriers. "The war on narcotics has been intensified and this is evident from the seizures we have had recently. Elaborate measures have been put in place. We have sniffer dogs at the airports and detectives have been stationed along the roads to specifically look out for drugs," said Jasper Ombati, the Police Spokesman, in an interview with The Sunday Standard.
Police, he says, have been used as scapegoats for serious national issues like drug trafficking for so long and it was time leaders began complementing police efforts rather than blame them.
But the behind the scenes intrigues that characterised the so-called cocaine haul, indicate that while the police may be doing their best, it is hard to break the drug syndicate.
For instance, on December 6, 2004, investigating officers of customs and exercise department in Belgium and Netherlands received an intelligence report from the International Network Service with very specific information. The International Network Service had on its part received the intelligence from the British authorities.
"A criminal organisation of Dutch and Kenyan persons is in possession of cargo of several tonnes of cocaine imported from South America to Kenya. They plan to export this cocaine to the Netherlands," the message said in part. The cocaine, according to the message, had been packaged in three containers — PCLU4334524, PCLU4334525 and PCLU2710841.
"These containers have already arrived in Antwerp and two of them contain a hidden space (concealment) with cocaine. The organisation is now busy preparing concealments in other containers in Kenya for future shipments of cocaine to the Netherlands," continued the message.
The concern among Western missions today is that while the message was very clear that there were several tonnes of cocaine, what the police finally seized was just one tonne. Where the other more-than-two-tonnes of cocaine disappeared to within just seven days remains one of the striking puzzles in that cocaine saga.
But that is not the greatest puzzle in this cocaine saga. After receiving that intelligence message on December 6, police in Holland arrested a suspect at Schipol Airport on December 8. On the same day, they informed Kenya Police of the matter, giving them full details as provided by the International Network Service. But this time, the message to the Kenyan Police had additional information about the whereabouts of the cocaine, the identity of the suspects, the quantity of the cocaine and the container numbers in which the shipments were.
In spite of the specificity of the intelligence information passed on to the Kenyan Police by their counterparts in Netherlands, "there was clearly no sign of urgency" — other Western missions say "there was lack of interest" —to arrest the suspects.
"Instead, someone tipped off the suspects who were residing at a house in the Kenyan coastal town of Malindi of their impending arrest," the diplomatic source said.
While the police were still dilly-dallying, therefore, the suspects paid off their workers, asked them to take some days off and later diverted part of the cocaine leaving only the one tonne that was eventually seized.
As if to demonstrate just how assured of their security they were, the suspects, on December 11, booked a plane from Malindi, made arrangements for car keys from Malindi Airport and flew right into the capital city, Nairobi, where they spent a night at Panafric Hotel.
The following day, December 12, they caught a flight at the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport and took off to an unknown destination. Yet the police, who had the tip off, did not act until two days later.
Why police did not act or prevent the chief suspects from leaving the country even after they had been given such details is the genesis of some very difficult questions by Kenya’s key international partners.
How, it is being asked, were these suspects allowed to fly out through JKIA, passing through all the airport security checks, when the Dutch police had supplied their names and photographs to the Kenyan security agencies?
Nonetheless, when the police finally acted on December 14, two days after the suspects had safely flown out of the country, they, first summoned the media so that the seizure of the consignment and arrest of a few suspects was done in such a spectacle. Then, secondly, they characteristically declared that the cocaine was worth Sh6.4 billion.
This too is being questioned by experts on drugs, together with Kenya’s key development partners including the US, the UK, Netherlands, Germany, France and Belgium among others.
It could not have been possible, they argue, for police to have known the value of the cocaine even before it was taken for testing by either a government chemist or otherwise to determine how pure it was.
This is because the price of cocaine, or any other drug for that matter, can only be determined after its level of purity is established. Besides, the price of a commodity can change any time depending on many factors including the stability of the currency. It is only the quantity of the seized cocaine that could remain constant. The best the police could do at that stage, therefore, was to state its quantity and not its market value.
But the question marks on the drug haul did not seem to end with the arrest of a few suspects and the seizure of a consignment.
First, says former Director of Public Prosecutions, Philip Murgor — whose responsibility it was to handle the subsequent prosecutions — the police issued a statement saying the consignment had been imported from Colombia and Venezuela. The cocaine, the police said, had been disguised as bananas in refrigerated containers in transit to the Netherlands.
But the police later changed the story on where the drugs actually came from. In a letter dated January 3 and copied to the ambassadors of Netherlands, Colombia, Venezuela and the United States in Nairobi, lawyers Kariuki Maigua and Company Advocates, acting for Pepe Limited, raise crucial questions over this sudden change of facts.
"According to the new story, the consignment of drugs was shipped into Mombasa in two containers that are supposed to have been loaded at Antwerp, Netherlands," wrote the lawyers Kariuki.
Pepe Limited’s premises — a licensed Customs area — was at the time of this correspondence being investigated in what police said was connected to the drugs case.
This inexplicable contradiction, as expected, meant the prosecutors were going to have an uphill task in the law courts. No one was going to believe, for instance, that the drug traffickers, with all their intelligence and consciousness over costs and risks of transporting the drugs, had brought the consignment all the way from Antwerp, Netherlands, to Nairobi and then, soon after, began planning to ship them back to Netherlands!
Yet this is not the only post-arrest aspect of the case that has been the subject of serious concerns from the international community. The investigations, say Western missions, were bungled at every stage and carried out as if, in the words of one diplomatic source, "it was a state project about which truth was not supposed to come out".
In fact, in her November 18, 2005 ruling in one of the cases of cocaine worth Sh1.6 billion, Senior Principal Magistrate, Mrs Rose Ougo, raised questions about police investigations. "I wonder why police and the Attorney General treat such cases lightly. I wonder why they brought the case. It was not adequately investigated," she said, dismissing the case and setting free the General Manager of Pepe Inland Limited, Bobby Macharia and others.
It is an issue about which Philip Murgor, the former DPP, concurs fully with and seems to believe that it could have contributed heavily to his being fired. He read about the drug seizure when he was just about to go for his Christmas off. "I indicated through my deputy to the Director of CID that this was a case of great public importance and the Attorney General would need to peruse the files and handle the prosecutions. I was later told that senior police officers scoffed at my idea and said I could take up the matter with the Police Commissioner if I wished," said Murgor.
During this time, he says, police engaged in "the most unusual and prejudicial practice" where statements were made in public implicating certain individuals even before investigations had been completed or charges preferred against anyone.
By the end of the first week since the seizure, no file had been submitted to the AG. At the end of the second week, being concerned that the suspects had been in custody beyond the statutory period, the former DPP expressed his concerns to senior police officers over the prejudicial statements, delay in arraigning suspects in court and the need for the AG to peruse the file. But, still, the situation did not improve.
By Christmas time, the files had not been submitted to the AG for perusal, meaning that by the time the DPP was proceeding on leave, the case had not been assigned to any prosecutor. Suddenly, senior CID officers started expressing concern that the suspects had been in custody for too long.
Here again, a tussle was to emerge between the police and the AG’s chambers. While the AG’s office assigned one of those regarded as the best prosecutors to handle the case, police insisted on someone of their choice. It turned out that the police had already struck an agreement with the prosecutor of their choice, even as they approached the AG over the matter.
Then the unorthodox things that had characterised the entire matter started taking an even more intriguing angle. First, the prosecutor began to handle the case without even perusing the investigations file, which means the prosecutor had no idea what kind of evidence was available.
How the prosecutor began to handle the case without prior knowledge of the strength of the evidence that had been gathered to prosecute the case is, again, a subject of many probing questions from the international community, including the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. When the file was finally submitted to the prosecutor months later, it turned out that sections with crucial evidence had been plucked out.
The Netherlands government, it emerged, had submitted to the Kenya Police an investigations file linking, among others, a cabinet minister, a member of parliament and a senior civil servant to the drugs haul. The file from Netherlands also had testimonies from witnesses that should have been crucial in not only prosecuting the case but also in future anti-drug trafficking initiatives. Why this bit of evidence was plucked out, and by whom, is yet another of the puzzles that have characterised this case.
But, however puzzling, that was not the most intriguing thing about the evidence from Netherlands. Police, acting on intelligence from Netherlands, and under pressure from the international community, secretly searched the house of a cabinet minister in December 2004. A police source leaked the search to the media, which quickly made mince meat out of it.
But two days later, police denied a cabinet minister’s house had been searched and forced the media to retract. While this charade was taking place in public, other things with far reaching implications were also happening behind the scenes.
The officer, a Chief Inspector, who had led the team of detectives into searching the minister’s house was quietly transferred to operations in Sudan. Now, there are those who are asking the inevitable question: Who gave orders for the officer to be transferred and why?
When the prosecutions in the Sh1.6 billion cocaine case began in January 2005, it became clear that Kenya’s laws on drug trafficking were far too inadequate and conflicting. The international community, including the UN, UK, US, Netherlands and other EU countries exerted pressure on the government to harmonise the laws and put in place what they describe as a protocol for prosecuting cases arising out of the cocaine haul and also for the future handling of such cases.
One section of the Kenyan law, for instance, allows the government chemist to test drugs only in the presence of the suspect while another section allows them to test it anyway. That means that, in this particular case where some suspects were being held in Netherlands, the drugs could not be tested. So, if someone substituted the drugs with something else or even with poor quality cocaine, it would not be possible to tell.
In its bid to help the government put up the so-called protocol, the UN managed to squeeze up a date for a meeting with senior government officials, including the police, on how to proceed. But all senior police officers, apart from one, failed to turn up for the meeting with officials of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Interestingly, the officer who turned up for that meeting and who seemed keen on pursuing the cocaine case to the end was quickly transferred to a far-flung location.
The Kenya government, however, succumbed to pressure after this initial reluctance. The State Law Office, previously known as the Attorney General’s Chambers, in conjunction with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime developed a protocol in line with international laws that was to be used in prosecuting the cases. But strangely again, even though the protocol was available, it was never applied in prosecuting the Sh1.6 billion case.
One of the issues that were to be taken care of by the protocol was the question of the custody of the seized drugs and how they will be destroyed when the case is finally dispensed with.
In regard, what is worrying the international community is: After the Sh1.6 billion case was determined, who is holding the drugs? Without any testing, and without any clear testing procedures, what is the guarantee that the drugs are still intact?
These fears have been fuelled by three main incidents. First are the reports that samples of the cocaine that was seized here have been detected in London.
Secondly, there were insinuations by lawyer Kariuki Maigua that the drugs may have been substituted with something else. In the letter to foreign missions and copied to various heads of departments in the Kenyan government, the lawyer made some specific claims:
"Kenya is a country where government officials wear many masks and as you read this letter, we could be in the middle of a massive cover-up of this scandal. Big sums of money could be changing hands to buy time for the destruction of evidence. Our client would be least surprised if by now even the actual exhibits have been tampered with, destroyed or even swapped with packets of maize flour," said the letter in part.
And even as the lawyer was making this allegation, the police seemed to lend credence to such fears. In January 2005 police argued in a letter that due to security concerns, the cocaine could not be presented before the trial court as required. Besides, due to the same security concerns, the court could not go to wherever the drugs were for viewing.
Then, after advancing all the arguments why the courts could not view the drugs, police dropped the shocker: "Under the circumstances, we are applying for the destruction of the seized drugs less the analysed samples," said their letter.
The police were, in other words, suggesting that all the 954 packets, save for the 148 packets that had been tested, should be destroyed without being verified by the court. This set the alarm bells ringing. To date, the 806 packets have never been tested.
Now foreign missions warn: If this issue is not well-handled and brought to a speedy and satisfactory conclusion, it could deal a devastating blow to Kenya’s credibility and could easily become one of the biggest scandals under the Narc Administration.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Sunday January 1, 2006
Cocaine haul
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By Otsieno Namwaya
The Kenya Government, and the police in particular, are again in the spotlight from the international community over the handling of drug hauls transiting through or destined for the country.
The events leading to the two separate seizures of cocaine consignments totalling over Sh8 billion slightly more than a year ago still intrigue Western powers determined to crush the global drug syndicate. One such seizure was done in Malindi in the full glare of the media on December 14, 2004.
The drug-busters think that for a cartel to feel confident enough to ferry consignments of cocaine worth billions of shillings at one go — which the cartels are always careful not to do — it must have been assured of protection from very senior people in government.
Besides, the containers with cocaine had reportedly been shipped into the country in March 2004 and by the time the drugs were "discovered" in December, part of the consignment had already reached the Netherlands.
While Kenyan authorities categorically deny ever assuring drug traffickers of security, the incidence of drug use has not reduced in the last one year raising fears that some impounded drug hauls may have found their way back into the market.
"There is anxiety in the country right now about (past) cocaine hauls. The main complaint is that the exhibits are recycling in the market; some have been detected in parts of Nairobi and Mombasa," says Joseph Kaguthi, the national coordinator of the National Agency for the Campaign Against Drug Abuse.
Since the seizure of the cocaine, he says, the supply of the drug to Kenyan consumers has increased, forcing the prices down to Sh150 per sachet, reputedly the lowest ever.
What worries the international community more is the fact that samples of the cocaine seized here were found in London when Kenya Airways employees were arrested early 2005 raising troubling questions on whether that specific cocaine is intact.
In the eyes of the international community, says Kaguthi, Kenya has now risen from a mere transit point for drug traffickers to a destination and storage point. This, he says, threatens the image of the country internationally.
Amid perceptions that there is complicity among senior government officials in the war against drug trafficking, junior police who try their best to expose the crime meet many roadblocks on the way.
"European diplomats have indicated to the Kenya government that they remain deeply concerned about the continuing level of drug trafficking in the country as evidenced by recent seizures at the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport," said a Nairobi-based diplomat of a European Union country who declined to be named.
When dismissing one of the cocaine cases last November, a magistrate blamed police for poor investigations and inadequate evidence.
But the police insist they are doing their best and have kept abreast with the new tactics drug traffickers are employing to ferry drugs such as use of couriers. "The war on narcotics has been intensified and this is evident from the seizures we have had recently. Elaborate measures have been put in place. We have sniffer dogs at the airports and detectives have been stationed along the roads to specifically look out for drugs," said Jasper Ombati, the Police Spokesman, in an interview with The Sunday Standard.
Police, he says, have been used as scapegoats for serious national issues like drug trafficking for so long and it was time leaders began complementing police efforts rather than blame them.
But the behind the scenes intrigues that characterised the so-called cocaine haul, indicate that while the police may be doing their best, it is hard to break the drug syndicate.
For instance, on December 6, 2004, investigating officers of customs and exercise department in Belgium and Netherlands received an intelligence report from the International Network Service with very specific information. The International Network Service had on its part received the intelligence from the British authorities.
"A criminal organisation of Dutch and Kenyan persons is in possession of cargo of several tonnes of cocaine imported from South America to Kenya. They plan to export this cocaine to the Netherlands," the message said in part. The cocaine, according to the message, had been packaged in three containers — PCLU4334524, PCLU4334525 and PCLU2710841.
"These containers have already arrived in Antwerp and two of them contain a hidden space (concealment) with cocaine. The organisation is now busy preparing concealments in other containers in Kenya for future shipments of cocaine to the Netherlands," continued the message.
The concern among Western missions today is that while the message was very clear that there were several tonnes of cocaine, what the police finally seized was just one tonne. Where the other more-than-two-tonnes of cocaine disappeared to within just seven days remains one of the striking puzzles in that cocaine saga.
But that is not the greatest puzzle in this cocaine saga. After receiving that intelligence message on December 6, police in Holland arrested a suspect at Schipol Airport on December 8. On the same day, they informed Kenya Police of the matter, giving them full details as provided by the International Network Service. But this time, the message to the Kenyan Police had additional information about the whereabouts of the cocaine, the identity of the suspects, the quantity of the cocaine and the container numbers in which the shipments were.
In spite of the specificity of the intelligence information passed on to the Kenyan Police by their counterparts in Netherlands, "there was clearly no sign of urgency" — other Western missions say "there was lack of interest" —to arrest the suspects.
"Instead, someone tipped off the suspects who were residing at a house in the Kenyan coastal town of Malindi of their impending arrest," the diplomatic source said.
While the police were still dilly-dallying, therefore, the suspects paid off their workers, asked them to take some days off and later diverted part of the cocaine leaving only the one tonne that was eventually seized.
As if to demonstrate just how assured of their security they were, the suspects, on December 11, booked a plane from Malindi, made arrangements for car keys from Malindi Airport and flew right into the capital city, Nairobi, where they spent a night at Panafric Hotel.
The following day, December 12, they caught a flight at the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport and took off to an unknown destination. Yet the police, who had the tip off, did not act until two days later.
Why police did not act or prevent the chief suspects from leaving the country even after they had been given such details is the genesis of some very difficult questions by Kenya’s key international partners.
How, it is being asked, were these suspects allowed to fly out through JKIA, passing through all the airport security checks, when the Dutch police had supplied their names and photographs to the Kenyan security agencies?
Nonetheless, when the police finally acted on December 14, two days after the suspects had safely flown out of the country, they, first summoned the media so that the seizure of the consignment and arrest of a few suspects was done in such a spectacle. Then, secondly, they characteristically declared that the cocaine was worth Sh6.4 billion.
This too is being questioned by experts on drugs, together with Kenya’s key development partners including the US, the UK, Netherlands, Germany, France and Belgium among others.
It could not have been possible, they argue, for police to have known the value of the cocaine even before it was taken for testing by either a government chemist or otherwise to determine how pure it was.
This is because the price of cocaine, or any other drug for that matter, can only be determined after its level of purity is established. Besides, the price of a commodity can change any time depending on many factors including the stability of the currency. It is only the quantity of the seized cocaine that could remain constant. The best the police could do at that stage, therefore, was to state its quantity and not its market value.
But the question marks on the drug haul did not seem to end with the arrest of a few suspects and the seizure of a consignment.
First, says former Director of Public Prosecutions, Philip Murgor — whose responsibility it was to handle the subsequent prosecutions — the police issued a statement saying the consignment had been imported from Colombia and Venezuela. The cocaine, the police said, had been disguised as bananas in refrigerated containers in transit to the Netherlands.
But the police later changed the story on where the drugs actually came from. In a letter dated January 3 and copied to the ambassadors of Netherlands, Colombia, Venezuela and the United States in Nairobi, lawyers Kariuki Maigua and Company Advocates, acting for Pepe Limited, raise crucial questions over this sudden change of facts.
"According to the new story, the consignment of drugs was shipped into Mombasa in two containers that are supposed to have been loaded at Antwerp, Netherlands," wrote the lawyers Kariuki.
Pepe Limited’s premises — a licensed Customs area — was at the time of this correspondence being investigated in what police said was connected to the drugs case.
This inexplicable contradiction, as expected, meant the prosecutors were going to have an uphill task in the law courts. No one was going to believe, for instance, that the drug traffickers, with all their intelligence and consciousness over costs and risks of transporting the drugs, had brought the consignment all the way from Antwerp, Netherlands, to Nairobi and then, soon after, began planning to ship them back to Netherlands!
Yet this is not the only post-arrest aspect of the case that has been the subject of serious concerns from the international community. The investigations, say Western missions, were bungled at every stage and carried out as if, in the words of one diplomatic source, "it was a state project about which truth was not supposed to come out".
In fact, in her November 18, 2005 ruling in one of the cases of cocaine worth Sh1.6 billion, Senior Principal Magistrate, Mrs Rose Ougo, raised questions about police investigations. "I wonder why police and the Attorney General treat such cases lightly. I wonder why they brought the case. It was not adequately investigated," she said, dismissing the case and setting free the General Manager of Pepe Inland Limited, Bobby Macharia and others.
It is an issue about which Philip Murgor, the former DPP, concurs fully with and seems to believe that it could have contributed heavily to his being fired. He read about the drug seizure when he was just about to go for his Christmas off. "I indicated through my deputy to the Director of CID that this was a case of great public importance and the Attorney General would need to peruse the files and handle the prosecutions. I was later told that senior police officers scoffed at my idea and said I could take up the matter with the Police Commissioner if I wished," said Murgor.
During this time, he says, police engaged in "the most unusual and prejudicial practice" where statements were made in public implicating certain individuals even before investigations had been completed or charges preferred against anyone.
By the end of the first week since the seizure, no file had been submitted to the AG. At the end of the second week, being concerned that the suspects had been in custody beyond the statutory period, the former DPP expressed his concerns to senior police officers over the prejudicial statements, delay in arraigning suspects in court and the need for the AG to peruse the file. But, still, the situation did not improve.
By Christmas time, the files had not been submitted to the AG for perusal, meaning that by the time the DPP was proceeding on leave, the case had not been assigned to any prosecutor. Suddenly, senior CID officers started expressing concern that the suspects had been in custody for too long.
Here again, a tussle was to emerge between the police and the AG’s chambers. While the AG’s office assigned one of those regarded as the best prosecutors to handle the case, police insisted on someone of their choice. It turned out that the police had already struck an agreement with the prosecutor of their choice, even as they approached the AG over the matter.
Then the unorthodox things that had characterised the entire matter started taking an even more intriguing angle. First, the prosecutor began to handle the case without even perusing the investigations file, which means the prosecutor had no idea what kind of evidence was available.
How the prosecutor began to handle the case without prior knowledge of the strength of the evidence that had been gathered to prosecute the case is, again, a subject of many probing questions from the international community, including the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. When the file was finally submitted to the prosecutor months later, it turned out that sections with crucial evidence had been plucked out.
The Netherlands government, it emerged, had submitted to the Kenya Police an investigations file linking, among others, a cabinet minister, a member of parliament and a senior civil servant to the drugs haul. The file from Netherlands also had testimonies from witnesses that should have been crucial in not only prosecuting the case but also in future anti-drug trafficking initiatives. Why this bit of evidence was plucked out, and by whom, is yet another of the puzzles that have characterised this case.
But, however puzzling, that was not the most intriguing thing about the evidence from Netherlands. Police, acting on intelligence from Netherlands, and under pressure from the international community, secretly searched the house of a cabinet minister in December 2004. A police source leaked the search to the media, which quickly made mince meat out of it.
But two days later, police denied a cabinet minister’s house had been searched and forced the media to retract. While this charade was taking place in public, other things with far reaching implications were also happening behind the scenes.
The officer, a Chief Inspector, who had led the team of detectives into searching the minister’s house was quietly transferred to operations in Sudan. Now, there are those who are asking the inevitable question: Who gave orders for the officer to be transferred and why?
When the prosecutions in the Sh1.6 billion cocaine case began in January 2005, it became clear that Kenya’s laws on drug trafficking were far too inadequate and conflicting. The international community, including the UN, UK, US, Netherlands and other EU countries exerted pressure on the government to harmonise the laws and put in place what they describe as a protocol for prosecuting cases arising out of the cocaine haul and also for the future handling of such cases.
One section of the Kenyan law, for instance, allows the government chemist to test drugs only in the presence of the suspect while another section allows them to test it anyway. That means that, in this particular case where some suspects were being held in Netherlands, the drugs could not be tested. So, if someone substituted the drugs with something else or even with poor quality cocaine, it would not be possible to tell.
In its bid to help the government put up the so-called protocol, the UN managed to squeeze up a date for a meeting with senior government officials, including the police, on how to proceed. But all senior police officers, apart from one, failed to turn up for the meeting with officials of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Interestingly, the officer who turned up for that meeting and who seemed keen on pursuing the cocaine case to the end was quickly transferred to a far-flung location.
The Kenya government, however, succumbed to pressure after this initial reluctance. The State Law Office, previously known as the Attorney General’s Chambers, in conjunction with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime developed a protocol in line with international laws that was to be used in prosecuting the cases. But strangely again, even though the protocol was available, it was never applied in prosecuting the Sh1.6 billion case.
One of the issues that were to be taken care of by the protocol was the question of the custody of the seized drugs and how they will be destroyed when the case is finally dispensed with.
In regard, what is worrying the international community is: After the Sh1.6 billion case was determined, who is holding the drugs? Without any testing, and without any clear testing procedures, what is the guarantee that the drugs are still intact?
These fears have been fuelled by three main incidents. First are the reports that samples of the cocaine that was seized here have been detected in London.
Secondly, there were insinuations by lawyer Kariuki Maigua that the drugs may have been substituted with something else. In the letter to foreign missions and copied to various heads of departments in the Kenyan government, the lawyer made some specific claims:
"Kenya is a country where government officials wear many masks and as you read this letter, we could be in the middle of a massive cover-up of this scandal. Big sums of money could be changing hands to buy time for the destruction of evidence. Our client would be least surprised if by now even the actual exhibits have been tampered with, destroyed or even swapped with packets of maize flour," said the letter in part.
And even as the lawyer was making this allegation, the police seemed to lend credence to such fears. In January 2005 police argued in a letter that due to security concerns, the cocaine could not be presented before the trial court as required. Besides, due to the same security concerns, the court could not go to wherever the drugs were for viewing.
Then, after advancing all the arguments why the courts could not view the drugs, police dropped the shocker: "Under the circumstances, we are applying for the destruction of the seized drugs less the analysed samples," said their letter.
The police were, in other words, suggesting that all the 954 packets, save for the 148 packets that had been tested, should be destroyed without being verified by the court. This set the alarm bells ringing. To date, the 806 packets have never been tested.
Now foreign missions warn: If this issue is not well-handled and brought to a speedy and satisfactory conclusion, it could deal a devastating blow to Kenya’s credibility and could easily become one of the biggest scandals under the Narc Administration.