A MEMBER of Kenya’s most famous white settler family has been freed from jail five months after being convicted of the manslaughter of a black poacher.
Thomas Cholmondeley, the Eton-educated son of the fifth Baron Delamere, was sentenced to eight months in prison in May for shooting dead Robert Njoya. The trial, which began in 2006, was one of the most sensational in Kenya’s post-independence history.
It came a year after Cholmondeley had killed an undercover game warden on his family’s 48,000-acre Soysambu estate in the Rift valley.
The first case was dropped by the state, prompting claims of high- level interference in the judicial process. At the time of his conviction for the second killing, Cholmondeley had already served nearly three years in jail.
Although he originally confessed to shooting Njoya, Cholmondeley later changed his story.
While dismissing the defence as an “afterthought”, the judge reduced the original charge of murder and delivered what he described as a light sentence because Cholmondeley had performed first aid on Njoya and helped transport him to hospital, where he died. The prosecution appealed against the verdict, but the result is still outstanding.
Prison officials said that Cholmondeley had been released yesterday from Nairobi’s Kamiti prison under rules allowing inmates who have served two-thirds of their sentence and behaved well to be freed early.
It is not known if he will remain in Kenya. His two children live in Britain with their mother, who separated from Cholmondeley after the first shooting.
While Kenya’s political elite families are now the largest property holders in the country, land ownership by white families remains a source of discontent among some of the landless poor. – (Guardian service)