The High Court’s Human Rights division has on Thursday thrown out a case in which blogger and social activist Cyprian Nyakundi was charged with extortion.
Blogger Nyakundi was in January last year arrested allegedly trying to take money from Vitoria Commercial Bank (VCB) for articles written in his blog.
The star witness of the arrests that was commandeered by a known drug dealer Nurdin “Tinta’ Akasha, was a Standard Media journalist Nicholas Asego.
Kenyans have been numerously warned against giving tips to journalists because most of them are undercover agents recruited into the National Intelligence Service (NIS). Nicholas Asego’s case confirms well.
Entrapment
VCB had been exposed by the blogger as a money-laundering outfit used by sellers of small and light weapons in the horn of Africa, human traffickers, and drug dealers.
One of its major customers, the Akasha family, who had just had 2 of their family members jailed in the USA for drug dealing, wanted to silence the blogger and so they withdrew money from their account at the bank, gave it to some crooked officers at the Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) and called Nyakundi that they wanted to talk to give their version of events.
Justice Antony Mrima has ruled that the evidence obtained by the DCI for the Nyakundi extortion case was done illegally and is therefore inadmissible before the court.
While clarifying some of the information contained in the blogger’s site, Tinta and some DCI officers stormed the place, arrested Nyakundi, confiscated his phones and a vehicle that he had hired. They then planted the Sh1 million that they had withdrawn from Tinta’s account at VCB as evidence that the blogger had asked for a bribe.
The case has dragged for slightly over a year, but the truth has come out that their star witness, the journalist from Standard Group was all part of an entrapment, a sting operation.
His statement attached below reeks of entrapment. Entrapment is the action of tricking someone into committing a crime in order to secure their prosecution.
