This archive report was first published on 18 August 2019.
Published on August 18, 2019, in the Sunday Standard, criminal lawyer Cliff Ombeta revealed intricate details of the events that led to the 25-year jail sentence slapped on convicted drug baron Baktash Akasha.
Ombeta blamed one of his clients, Vijayghiri Goswami, for the tribulations of Baktash and his younger brother Ibrahim, saying Goswami had cut a deal with the United State's Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and entered Kenya on a forged Indian passport in late 2012.
When US and Kenyan detectives burst into Baktash’s Nyali residence on January 26, 2017, they arrested his brother Ibrahim and Goswami and simultaneously seized Pakistani national Gulam Hussein at his residence in Bombolulu. Baktash was also in the house, but he managed to flee by scaling the compound’s perimeter wall only to be sold out moments later by an Italian informant who led the American law enforcement team straight to one of his hideouts.
Star witness Goswami testified against the Akashas in a New York court, implicating them in a decades-old drug trafficking, murder, and racketeering operation that also involved widespread bribery of judicial and top government officials.
Ombeta challenged Goswami, Kenya, and US officials to publish any evidence that defense lawyers, judges, and magistrates were on a mission to defeat justice with regard to the Akashas’ case during a two-year period that his former clients battled extradition orders to the US.
He dismissed Goswami’s claims of bribery as sweeping and not backed by facts on record and evidence, saying Goswami’s testimony was at best “salacious and a tissue of lies at worst contrived by a determined opportunist”.
Ombeta also accused the government of ceding its sovereignty to the DEA and courts and characterised the Akashas removal from Kenya as an abduction that flouted Kenya’s extradition and international laws as well as United Nations conventions.
