Four police officers in Kenya have been found guilty of manslaughter over the death of British aristocrat Alexander Monson, almost a decade after his death in police custody in 2012.
Alexander Monson was the first son of Lord Nicholas Monson of Burton, near Lincoln, and heir to the family estate.
He moved to Kenya in 2008 to live with his mother. He was living in Kenya with his mother in 2012 when he was arrested for allegedly taking bhang, a form of cannabis. While in police custody he allegedly died of drug overdose, but the family have always maintained that he was killed by police.
Naftali Chege, Charles Wangombe Munyiri, Baraka Bulima and John Pamba were convicted on Monday, November 15 of killing Monson, who died at a police station in Mombasa almost a decade ago.
This comes after three of the officers reportedly denied the charge at the High Court in Mombasa in 2018, while a warrant had been issued for Pamba who had failed to appear at that hearing. In January 2019 the officers were put on trial for murder, but the trail was adjourned in March last year at the end of the prosecution case.
At this week’s hearing Judge Erick Ogola ruled that Monson was brutally tortured by unknown people, and said the officers had covered up what happened to the 28-year-old, according to BBC.
This comes after Monson’s mother told the court in 2019 that her son was not a drug addict. A pathologist hired by the family found that he was killed by a blow to the back of his head. Toxicology reports showed he had no drugs in his system at the time.
Alexander, born to Baron Monson while he worked as a journalist for The Times in 1987, attended school at Marlborough College. He later won a scholarship to study at Chelsea Art College and, after graduation, he moved onto Kenya.
His mother had given him some land where he planned to cultivate a commercial bamboo, and he quickly made a group of local who he was socialising with on the morning of his arrest, according to the Daily Mail.
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