Blood ‘switched’ after heir’s death in Kenyan custody
Son of British aristocrat died of deliberate blows, rather than drug overdose, expert tells murder trial
BLOOD samples used by authorities in Kenya to claim that the son of a British aristocrat had taken a cocktail of drugs before dying in police custody were almost certainly switched, a court in Mombasa heard on Wednesday.
Kenyan police long asserted that Alexander Monson, the 28-year-old heir to the 12th Baron Monson, died of a drugs overdose in the hours after his arrest on suspicion of smoking cannabis in May 2012.
But a leading British forensic expert testifying at the trial of four police officers accused of beating Mr Monson to death said that little about the claim made sense.
Jason Payne-james, a specialist who has investigated deaths of detainees round the world, told the court in Kenya’s second city that initial blood and urine samples taken from Mr Monson’s body showed no trace of drugs.
But a second batch of samples tested in South Africa recorded a presence of cocaine, amphetamines, barbiturates and heroin by-products.
Not only was the discrepancy “very odd”, Dr Payne-james said, the second set of samples contradicted each other, with cocaine being found in the urine sample but not in the blood, something that was not medically possible.
Authorities had also not kept a comprehensive record of the movements of the samples, he said – a failure that could have allowed tampering. “A review of these records leads one to suspect whether these samples came from Alexander,” he told the court. “I don’t believe that they did.”
Dr Payne-james, who conducted an independent review of toxicology, post-mortem and police reports filed on the case, noted that the death was not consistent with a drugs overdose.
Lord Monson and his ex-wife, Hilary, say they have faced more than seven years of obfuscation in their quest to discover what happened to their son, who was found by family friends convulsing and unconscious on the floor of a police station in the resort of Diani.
The case has been seized on by campaigners in Kenya, who say it demonstrates a systemic level of impunity and cover-up within the Kenyan criminal justice system.
The Monsons achieved an unexpected breakthrough last year when an inquest concluded that their son had died of “blunt-force trauma” while in custody and recommended murder charges against the four police officers.
They pleaded not guilty at the start of the trial, which began in January but has suffered several postponements.
Dr Payne-james addressed subsequent
‘There has obviously been a cover-up. The defendants … are trying to push the blame on to each other’
official assertions that if Mr Monson had not died of a drugs overdose, then he must have died because fellow inmates carrying his unconscious figure dropped him on his head.
He said his analysis of the post-mortem examination found Mr Monson had suffered deliberate blows to his scrotum, left arm and the back of his head, the latter causing his death.
Mrs Monson, who flew down from the Kenyan capital Nairobi when she received news of her son’s arrest, found him handcuffed to a bed in hospital. He died shortly after.
“There has obviously been a coverup,” Mrs Monson said yesterday. “Jason’s evidence makes it very difficult to contest the facts. The defendants aren’t even trying to say that nothing happened … they are trying to push the blame on to each other.”
The trial continues.