Pastor Gilbert Deya extradited to Kenya over miracle babies scam – VIDEO
Controversial UK-based Kenyan televangelist Gilbert Deya has been deported back to Kenya to face child trafficking and abduction charges.
Inspector General of Police Joseph Boinnet said Mr Deya, who is accused of stealing Kenyan babies and passing them off in the UK as miracle babies, landed at the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport on Friday morning under tight security.
“He has been handed over to the CID who are preparing to take him to court. He was extradited from the UK,” Mr Boinnet told Capital FM.
The televangelist lost a long-standing court battle against the extradition, in which he argued that it would breach his human rights to send him back to his home country.
STEALING CHILDREN
He faces trial for allegedly stealing five children between 1999 and 2004 in Kenya.
The children were allegedly harboured by Deya and his wife Mary between May 1999 and August 2004 after being taken from their parents without consent.
The allegations first emerged in a BBC report in 2004 which said that infertile or post-menopausal women who attended his church were told they would be having “miracle” babies.
The babies were always ‘delivered’ in backstreet clinics in Nairobi and in at least one case DNA tests showed the baby did not belong to the couple involved.
In September 2011, Britain’s then Interior minister Theresa May, ordered that Deya be returned to Kenyan authorities after he exhausted all his avenues of appeal.
His extradition was ordered in December 2007 but he filed an appeal.
ARCHBISHOP
Deya has been running his Gilbert Deya Ministries operation from Peckham, south London, and says he was consecrated as an archbishop in the United States in 1992.
In opposing his extradition, Deya claimed he was likely to face torture and inhuman and degrading treatment if sent back to Kenya. A British court originally approved his extradition in 2007 and he then fought the decision through higher courts.
His church’s website says it has a membership of more than 34,000 in Britain and claims to be the fastest-growing ministry in the world.
