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 19,400-hectare 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. Though he originally confessed to shooting Njoya, Cholmondeley later changed his story, suggesting that a white rally driver friend who was with him had fired the fatal shot when they stumbled across a group of poachers.
While dismissing the defense 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 Cholmondeley was released on Friday from Nairobi’s Kamiti prison under rules allowing inmates who have served two-thirds of their sentence and behaved well to be freed early.
A message on a Web site run by his close family and friends said that he was driven out of the prison on Friday morning. He was taken to the family farm near Naivasha, 88km northwest of Nairobi, where his parents live, said his lawyer, Fred Ojiambo. It is not known whether Cholmondeley will remain in Kenya. His two children live in the UK with their mother, who separated from Cholmondeley after the first shooting.
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