July 2001 Africa News Headlines

NAIROBI - President Daniel arap Moi and a senior cabinet minister filed a lawsuit yesterday against a former US ambassador to Kenya who they allege portrays them as murderers.

Moi and Trade and Industry Minister Nicholas Biwott - a powerful member of the president's inner circle - allege that Smith Hempstone defamed them in his 1997 memoirs, "The Rogue Ambassador."

Hempstone was an outspoken critic of Moi's government during his term as ambassador between 1989 and 1993.

In a joint lawsuit filed in Nairobi High Court by attorney Shapley Barret, Moi and Biwott contest a paragraph of the book in which Hempstone writes about an alleged meeting between the pair and former Foreign Minister Robert Ouko on Feb.

13, 1990, which, Hempstone writes, led to the latter's death.

Ouko, who had just returned from a trip to the United States, disappeared from his home on a farm in western Kenya on February 13, 1990.

His charred body was found three days later, shot and burned with diesel fuel.

The circumstances behind Ouko's death have never been solved.

In his book, Hempstone writes that after Ouko returned from Washington, a furious Moi summoned the foreign minister to State House "in the early morning hours" of February 13, 1990.

Moi alleges in the lawsuit that his reputation, character and credit had been seriously injured and had been brought "to public odium, scandal and contempt" by the passage. - Nampa-Sapa-AP

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