A Kenyan citizen wrongfully jailed for a decade has sued British police.
The Kenyan man, identified as Ali Kololo, was wrongfully sentenced to death over an alleged attack on British tourists.
He was the only suspect in a case that involved the murder of a British holidaymaker David Tebutt, and the kidnapping of his wife, Judith Tebutt, at a resort close to the Kenya-Somali border.
Tebutt was shot dead, and his wife Judith was kidnapped and taken to Somalia, where she was released six months later after a ransom was paid.
During the incident, Kololo was convicted of robbery with violence in connection with the 2011 attack, but his conviction was quashed after he had served more than a decade in 2023.
Kilolo is now suing the metropolitan police through his lawyers arguing that the authorities provided misleading evidence to a Kenyan court that led to his harsh sentence.
The lawyers further argued that his decade-long stay at prison was subject to ‘appalling conditions’.
Among those included in the case was for detective chief inspector Neil Hibberd who according to Kololo’s lawyer failed to provide key information on the prosecution’s allegations that a footprint linked Kololo was found at the crime scene.
Furthermore, Kololo did and did not fit a pair of shoes presented as a match for the footprint during his trial.
Preetha Gopalan, head of UK Litigation, now wants the Metropolitan police to issue an apology to Kololo and compensate him.
“Is the UK government continuing to provide this kind of assistance to countries around the world and becoming complicit in human rights violations because they haven’t learned the lessons from the past?”
