ICC Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda planned to entrap President Uhuru Kenyatta by provoking him into skipping a key court session.
Uhuru’s lead lawyer Steven Kay has claimed that Bensouda had the court summon Uhuru for a status conference in the hope that the President would fail to attend and a warrant of arrest would be issued.
Speaking to The Hague Trials Kenya website, Kay said the prosecution adopted this and a number of other tactics because they knew they had a bad case on their hands
This, he said, included alleging witness interference and difficulties with the Kenya Government, both of which aimed at putting the blame elsewhere.
“I also believe the very last status conference we had, where Uhuru Kenyatta attended court, for no apparent reason at all, was a staged hearing by the prosecution and the Court to see whether he would turn up. If he didn’t turn up, a warrant could be issued, and he’d look like a bad guy,” Kay said.
He added that he advised Uhuru to attend and there was never any question of his not turning up.
Kay also revealed that Kenyan civil society activists refused to meet the defence team to answer to allegations that they had set him up.
“All of them refused to cooperate with the defence and be interviewed, even though I said that it was in the interests of truth and justice. There were other matters I also wanted to interview them about which had come to my attention during defence investigations,” Kay said.
Kay said that they interviewed someone from the KNCHR on their report on the post-election violence and unearthed discrepancies from the different versions.
“They produced the, I think, three versions of the report, if my memory serves me correct, and showed us the discrepancies and the story that when the first version came out, the first draft, that senior people had ordered that it be squashed, that it be pulped and rewritten,” Kay said.
“There was much more that went to very big issues in this case, and how what started off initially as allegations of a stolen election and civil conflict, then was contextualised into being organised post-election violence for both sides, and then morphed, changed as well into further allegations that were simply unconnected with the post-election violence, such as the extrajudicial killings of the Mungiki,” Kay said.
– the-star.co.ke
