|
Aristocrat in court over shooting
|
|
Police have arrested a British aristocrat after he allegedly shot dead a suspected poacher, nearly a year after prosecutors dropped a murder charge against him for killing a man on his family's estate.
Thomas Cholmondeley, son of the 5th Baron Delamere and great-grandson of Kenya's most prominent early British settler, told police on Wednesday that the middle-aged dead man had been slaughtering wild animals on his farm in the central Rift Valley. |
The killing came just over a year after Cholmondeley shot and killed an undercover Kenya Wildlife Service officer on the 40,468-hectare Delamere estate.
"According to Tom, the suspect was conducting illegal trade when the shooting occurred," Simon Kiragu, the police commander from Naivasha, about 90 kilometres north-west of Nairobi, said on Wednesday. Police arrested Cholmondeley and a colleague, Carl Jean Pierre Tundo, who was with him at the shooting.
A police source said the pair had been taking an evening walk when they encountered five men carrying a dead impala. When the men, who were armed with machetes, were asked to stop, they set dogs on the two farmers. "In the process, Tom shot dead the two dogs and shot one suspect on the pelvic bone as the rest fled," the source said.
The unidentified man died of his wounds on the way to hospital. The shooting is likely to spark controversy in the valley where resentment over the dropping of murder charges last year still runs high among the Maasai tribe.
Cholomondeley's great grandfather, Hugh, was a key player in the British colonization of Kenya. His grandfather achieved notoriety in 1955 when he married Diana Broughton, whose former lover, the 22nd Earl of Errol, was murdered in Nairobi.
The saga was recounted in the book White Mischief.
|
