Kenyan Health Minister Charity Ngilu was arrested last night for going to help a women's rights activist who was reportedly being roughed up by police for protesting against a plan to award members of parliament a US$91,550 bonus.
Ngilu, one of Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki's most visible Cabinet ministers, is accused of helping Ann Njogu, executive director of the Center for Rights Education and Awareness, to "escape" from police custody on Tuesday.
Ngilu forced police to release the activist, who had hurt her leg after allegedly being shoved down a flight of stairs, and drove her to hospital.
Njogu was rearrested the next morning. She and four other campaigners detained during Tuesday's pay protest were freed by a high court judge on Thursday morning. After the five were freed, police summoned Ngilu to the criminal investigations department headquarters, where she was arrested Thursday night.
Her lawyer, Paul Muite, a fellow member of parliament (MP), described the move as "nonsensical," and said the case was politically motivated.
Ngilu was reported earlier this week to have met leaders of the main opposition party, a move that could have implications for the general election later this year.
The arrest will heap pressure on Kibaki's government, which is already facing a backlash over the proposal to give the country's 222 MPs a US$91,550 "golden handshake." The MPs, who set and approve their own salaries, typically earn US$142,400 a year.
The plan prompted Njoku and several dozen other demonstrators, including Mwalimu Mati, former head of the Kenyan chapter of Transparency International, to try to deliver a petition against the pay plan to parliament on Tuesday. Police broke up the protest by firing teargas and detaining the main organizers, accusing them of taking part in an unlawful assembly.
Many people believe the real reason for the heavy-handed police action may relate to the recent work of Mati. Through Mars Group, the organization he heads, Mati has published detailed reports of dubious contracts entered into by the government, which was elected on an anti-corruption platform but has shown little inclination to punish high-level corruption.
While four Cabinet ministers did resign last year after being linked to deals worth hundreds of millions of pounds, three have since been reappointed by Kibaki.
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
BACK TO BATTLE: North Korean soldiers have returned to the front lines in Russia’s Kursk region after earlier reports that Moscow had withdrawn them following heavy losses Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Friday pored over a once-classified map of vast deposits of rare earths and other critical minerals as part of a push to appeal to US President Donald Trump’s penchant for a deal. The US president, whose administration is pressing for a rapid end to Ukraine’s war with Russia, on Monday said he wanted Ukraine to supply the US with rare earths and other minerals in return for financially supporting its war effort. “If we are talking about a deal, then let’s do a deal, we are only for it,” Zelenskiy said, emphasizing Ukraine’s need for security guarantees