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'Victim frequented farm'
30/10/2006 21:11 - (SA)
Nairobi - The high profile murder trial of a British aristocrat charged with killing a Kenyan poacher resumed on Monday with a witness testifying the victim frequented the defendant's family farm.
After a month-long break in the trial of Thomas Cholmondeley, son of the fifth Baron Delamere and great-grandson of Kenya's most prominent early settler, the witness said he had gone with the slain man to the farm to poach many times before the May 10 incident.
"We had gone there more than 10 times before," Joseph Kamau told the Nairobi court, appearing for the prosecution, which is trying to prove Cholmondeley killed Robert Njoya in cold blood despite his claim it was accidental.
Kamau said he had heard a gunshot moments after he and a third man who also already testified slaughtered an impala they had caught in a snare they laid at the vast Delamare ancestral estate in central Kenya's Rift Valley.
He said all three of them had taken off running, but then heard five successive shots as well as a dog yelping in pain.
'Intentionally shot and killed Njoya'
"After I head the gunshot, I ran away," said Kamau.
Cholmondeley, who last year escaped murder charges in the killing of another Kenyan on the property about 90km northwest of Nairobi, has pleaded innocent in the case that has ripped open old colonial-era wounds.
He says he accidentally shot Njoya, 37, after encountering poachers who threatened him and set their dogs on him at the Delamere's Soysambu ranch in the Rift Valley, where crime against Europeans has been on the rise.
But prosecutors say Cholmondeley intentionally shot and killed Njoya with a high-powered hunting rifle while he was running away and then tried to cover up the crime by tampering with evidence at the scene.
Cholomondeley's trial has revived deep-seated resentment of wealthy whites, particularly since the murder charge against him in the second killing - that of a wildlife ranger he said he mistook for a thief - was dropped.
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