Kenya aristocrat claims murder trial cover-up

The scion of Kenya's most famous white settler family yesterday denied murdering a poacher and said that he covered up for his rally driver friend who had also fired his weapon at the crime scene. Thomas Cholmondeley, heir to the 5th Baron Delamere, was speaking at the start of his defence case at Nairobi high court. He has been held in Kamiti maximum security prison since May 2006, when he was arrested for the murder of Robert Njoya on his family's 58,000-acre Soysambu estate in the Rift Valley. At the time, Cholmondeley told police that he had accidentally shot Njoya with a hunting rifle while aiming for the poachers' dogs, which had charged him. But yesterday, before a packed court, Cholmondeley insisted that he had not fired the fatal bullet. "Up to now I cannot see how I could have shot that person [Njoya]," said... [read full story]