UK-based Kenyan televangelist Gilbert Deya has been charged in a London court with a string of sex related offences.
According to the Guardian newspaper
in the UK, the self-styled "Miracle Babies" preacher was charged with
three counts of rape and one count of attempted rape against a woman.
He was further charged with an additional count of sexual assault by indecently touching a 14-year old girl.
Pastor Deya, 61, appeared before a Camberwell
magistrates court on Friday and was remanded in custody to appear at
inner London crown court for a preliminary hearing on November 8, the
paper said.
The self-proclaimed Archbishop of Gilbert Deya
Ministries, which claims a UK membership of 36,000, is not new to
controversies since publicly proclaiming that he can help infertile
women get children.
Mr Deya has been battling extradition to Kenya to
face charges of child abduction, claiming that he cannot receive a fair
trial in Kenyan courts.
In September 2011, UK Interior minister Theresa
May ordered that the preacher be returned to Kenyan authorities after he
exhausted all his avenues of appeal but nothing came of it as the
matter died down.
Mr Deya had claimed that extraditing him to Kenya
would be a breach of his human rights since he would not get a fair
trial following accusations that he stole five children aged between 22
months and four-and-a-half years between 1999 and 2004.
His "miracle babies" saga came to light in 2004
when his conduct was aired on the BBC Radio 4 investigative programme
"Face the Facts".
It was alleged that infertile or post-menopausal
women who attended his church in Peckham, South London, were told they
would have "miracle babies".
Beyond imagination
He explained the births of children with DNA
different to that of their alleged parents as the work of God, saying
that the "miracle babies" were beyond human imagination.
"It is not something I can say I can explain
because they are of God and things of God cannot be explained by a human
being, “ said Mr Deya who added that he had enabled 22 infertile and
menopausal women to have miracle babies.
His wife, Mary Juma Deya has faced similar charges
of child abduction and was in 2004 jailed for two years by a Kenyan
court for abducting a two-year-old baby.
Mrs Deya was again jailed in 2009 for three years
after she was found guilty of abducting a three-year-old boy. She was
however acquitted in other allegations of abducting five other children
in 2011.
The family’s controversies did not end there as
their adopted son, Paul Otieno Deya was charged with the murder of his
three-year-old boy and the attempted murder of his wife in 2009.
Paul was suspected of having killed his son Wilson
and stabbing the boy’s mother, Jacqueline Achieng Otieno in a ferocious
knife attack at their home on Lynton Road, Southwark, South East London
before turning the knife on himself.
SOURCE: AFRICA REVIEW
SOURCE: AFRICA REVIEW
