UK skips probe into its soldiers’ grievous crimes
British forces in Kenya are accused of committing acts of murder, sexual violence and arson as recently as 2021.
Mukanzi Musanga in Nairobi
Kenyan MPs are outraged that senior officials of Batuk – the British Army Training Unit in Kenya – skipped a parliamentary hearing on alleged crimes by British soldiers in Nanyuki, Laikipia county, where the unit is stationed.
British soldiers are accused of murder, sexual violence, and other abuses – most notably the 2012 killing of 21-year-old Agnes Wanjiru. She was last seen with British soldiers before her mutilated body was found in a hotel septic tank. A Kenyan judge ruled she was killed by a British soldier.
“These violations have been happening for many years but the government is not willing to protect Kenyans,” said Kepher Ojijo, a lawyer representing Kenyans who sued the United Kingdom’s defence ministry over British soldiers abandoning children who they had fathered in Nanyuki.
The Batuk agreement, signed in 1964, granted British soldiers diplomatic immunity while in Kenya. The immunity was scrapped in 2016. In 2023, the National Assembly’s defence and foreign relations committee began investigating the abuses, including claims that Batuk caused the 2021 Lolldaiga Conservancy fire, which destroyed 12,000 acres of wildlife habitat at Mount Kenya’s foothills.
Committee members say UK officials deliberately ignored summonses. The British High Commission, however, said on Wednesday that UK government agencies had not received a formal invitation to the proceedings.
Ojijo dismissed the legislators’ outrage as “theatrics”, saying they “will not do anything to the soldiers because they are still afraid of the UK government – even after independence”.
In the child-abandonment case Ojijo and his clients filed in UK courts, a judge recently ordered the British defence ministry to trace and disclose the identity of soldiers who sired children in Nanyuki. Some of those abandoned children are now adults whose paternity entitles them to British citizenship.
The UK government also agreed to compensate 228 Nanyuki residents maimed or bereaved by explosions from British army munitions.