分类： world

A high-profile case linking four Kenyan men to the killing of a Scottish businessman has taken a new turn, as the quartet is now set to appear in court for an unrelated violent robbery charge against an American tourist.

Campbell Scott Alistair, a 58-year-old businessperson hailing from Dunfermline, Fife, traveled to Nairobi, Kenya’s capital, for a professional conference in February 2025. Shortly after checking into his local hotel, Scott vanished without a trace. Days of frantic search efforts ended in tragedy when investigators located his body concealed inside a sack, dumped in a remote forest roughly 60 miles outside Nairobi.

Earlier this month, Kenyan law enforcement announced the arrest of Bernard Mbusu, Isaac Kinoti Kobia, Evans Muthengi Mutaki and Kelvin Mwangi Njoroge, publicly naming the four as prime suspects in Scott’s murder. In an official social media statement shortly after the arrests, the Directorate of Criminal Investigations noted that the operation that took the suspects into custody was intelligence-driven and multi-agency, adding the men were tied not only to Scott’s abduction and killing but also to a string of violent robberies targeting foreign nationals.

What has become a layered legal process now sees the four men facing separate charges for a violent armed robbery that took place on April 11 at a holiday apartment in the Nyali district of Mombasa, a coastal Kenyan tourist hub. Prosecutors allege the group attacked an American man staying at the property, stealing approximately £4,000 in cash alongside personal property including a laptop, smartphone and jewelry with a combined estimated value of £1,100. All four suspects have entered a plea of not guilty to the robbery charges.

Notably, the Mombasa robbery case has no official connection to the ongoing investigation into Scott’s murder, according to court documents. In a recent ruling, the court granted bail to the four men, setting the total bail amount at 1,000,000 Kenyan shillings, equal to roughly £5,700. The robbery case is scheduled to resume in court on May 27.

As of press time, Kenyan law enforcement officials have not responded to requests for comment on the current status of the Scott murder investigation, nor have they confirmed whether the four men still remain official suspects in his killing.

A devastating targeted attack by armed gunmen on an unregistered orphanage in Nigeria’s north-central Kogi State has left 23 people abducted, with eight children still unaccounted for days after the assault, local authorities confirmed this week. The brazen Sunday raid also saw the owner of the unlicensed child care facility taken captive by the attackers, according to Kogi State Information Commissioner Kingsley Fanwo. Following a rapid, coordinated mobilization of local security agencies, 15 of the abducted children have been successfully rescued from captivity, Fanwo stated in an official briefing Monday.

To date, no armed faction has publicly claimed responsibility for the attack. But senior security sources familiar with regional instability note that Kogi State hosts an active operational cell of the jihadist insurgent group Boko Haram, and the area has already seen a string of violent, opportunistic attacks targeting vulnerable communities in recent months.

The orphanage attack is the latest high-profile incident in Nigeria’s growing national kidnap crisis, which has plagued regions across the country for years. Transnational criminal gangs regularly abduct civilians, including children, to demand large ransom payments. While the Nigerian federal government has formally outlawed ransom payments to kidnappers, the ban has done little to curb the frequency of these attacks, as criminal networks continue to profit from the practice despite increased security deployments.

In his Monday statement, Commissioner Fanwo emphasized that the targeted orphanage had been operating illegally in a remote, bushy rural area without the knowledge or official approval of state regulatory authorities. He issued a formal warning to all operators of orphanages, schools, and residential care institutions across the state to complete required regulatory registration and coordinate regularly with relevant government agencies, particularly amid the country’s ongoing volatile security environment.

Mass abductions of children at educational and care facilities have become increasingly common across northern Nigeria, where long-running insurgency and weak security infrastructure have created conditions for rampant kidnapping. This incident marks the first recorded attack specifically targeting an orphanage in the country. The attack echoes a much larger mass abduction in November 2025, when more than 300 students and their teachers were seized from a Catholic secondary school in neighboring Niger State, also in north-central Nigeria. All captives were eventually released in two separate batches, with the final group regaining freedom more than a month after their abduction. The Nigerian government has repeatedly denied widespread reports that it paid a large ransom to secure their release, or that it swapped two detained Boko Haram commanders for the hostages as part of a negotiated deal.

Nigerian authorities have reaffirmed their commitment to locating and rescuing the eight remaining missing children from the Kogi State orphanage attack, saying security operations are ongoing in the area. “The government remains fully committed to ensuring the rescue of all the victims,” Fanwo said.

A devastating aviation disaster has killed every person onboard a small passenger aircraft that crashed in South Sudan early Monday, according to official confirmation from the country’s Civil Aviation Authority (SSCAA). The CityLink Aviation-operated flight, a Cessna 208 Caravan, had departed the city of Yei at 9:15 a.m. local time bound for Juba, a roughly 130-kilometer route southwest of the capital. Roughly 30 minutes into the journey, authorities lost all contact with the aircraft, which ultimately crashed approximately 20 kilometers outside Juba.

Preliminary investigations point to severe weather as the most likely cause of the crash. In an official statement, the SSCAA noted that initial reports link the crash to poor atmospheric conditions, specifically extremely low visibility that hindered the pilot’s navigation. A specialized investigation team has already been deployed to the remote crash site to collect evidence and confirm the root cause of the incident.

Official passenger and crew breakdowns confirm the flight carried 14 people total: one pilot and 13 passengers. Among those killed were 12 citizens of South Sudan and two Kenyan nationals. No survivors have been recovered from the crash site.

The crash renews longstanding concerns about aviation safety in South Sudan, where air travel infrastructure remains chronically underdeveloped, and the country has a well-documented poor aviation safety record. Air accidents are relatively frequent across the nation, with most incidents commonly attributed to two key risk factors: overloaded aircraft and unpredictable, severe weather conditions. This is not the first deadly air disaster to hit the country in recent years: in January 2025, a plane carrying 20 oil workers crashed just three minutes after takeoff near Unity State’s northern oil fields, killing everyone onboard.

A devastating aviation disaster has claimed 14 lives near the capital of South Sudan, after a small Cessna aircraft went down on the outskirts of Juba earlier this week, South Sudan’s Civil Aviation Authority has confirmed. All 13 passengers and one pilot aboard the flight lost their lives in the crash, which occurred roughly 20 kilometers (12 miles) from the center of the capital.

The aircraft was en route to Juba from the southern South Sudanese town of Yei when it experienced an emergency that led to its crash. Preliminary investigations into the incident point to severe weather conditions as the most likely cause. Dense fog and low cloud cover drastically reduced visibility for the pilot, creating dangerous flying conditions that contributed to the accident, the authority said.

Among the casualties, two of the deceased hold Kenyan nationality, while all other 12 victims are South Sudanese citizens, the authority confirmed. No survivors have been found at the crash site.

Shortly after the crash was reported, an official investigative and response team was deployed to the remote hilly location to recover remains and begin piecing together the full circumstances of the disaster. User-generated footage of the accident scene that circulated widely across social media platforms in the hours after the crash shows smoldering wreckage of the plane still engulfed in open flames. The landscape captured in the videos matches the civil aviation authority’s account of poor weather, with heavy mist blanketing the hilly terrain where the aircraft came down.

The crash marks one of the deadliest aviation incidents in South Sudan this year, and it has prompted the national aviation authority to launch a full review to confirm the exact cause of the disaster and identify any safety gaps that may have contributed to the tragedy.

In a groundbreaking move that signals a growing shift toward accountability for colonial-era cultural theft, a British museum institution has announced plans to hand back 45 historical cultural artefacts to their country of origin, Botswana. This transfer, arranged through a formal collaborative partnership between the UK and Botswanan museum sectors, is being hailed as the first large-scale repatriation of indigenous cultural heritage ever carried out by a United Kingdom museum.

The objects set for return were originally pulled from Botswana’s Gammangwato region in the 1890s, collected by Christian missionary Rev William Charles Willoughby during the height of British colonial expansion across southern Africa. The collection spans a broad cross-section of daily and cultural life for local communities, including traditional clothing, personal accessories, hunting tools, and everyday domestic items that carry deep cultural meaning for Batswana people.

The process that led to this transfer grew out of the Making African Connections initiative, a research and partnership project led by the University of Sussex that ran between 2019 and 2021, which built formal connections between Brighton & Hove Museums and Botswana’s Khama III Memorial Museum based in Serowe. Two years after the project concluded, in 2022, the Khama III Museum submitted a formal repatriation claim for the collection, launching the negotiation process that has now resulted in an agreement for return.

Curators on both sides of the partnership have framed the transfer as far more than a simple movement of objects across borders. Portia Tremlett, senior curator at Brighton & Hove Museums, emphasized that the repatriation fills a critical long-standing gap by returning cultural items to the community that created and gave them meaning. “This repatriation represents an important step in reconnecting these artefacts with the communities, histories and knowledge systems that give them meaning,” Tremlett explained.

For the receiving institution and the people of Botswana, the handback carries profound meaning for cultural self-determination. Gase Kediseng, curator at the Khama III Memorial Museum, described the transfer as an act of historical restoration that goes beyond material exchange. “This process affirms dignity, identity, and material culture, empowering [the people of] Batswana to tell their own story on their own terms through objects that represent who we were, and who we continue to be,” Kediseng said.

The 45 artefacts are scheduled to be unveiled to the public as part of a new permanent exhibition opening at the Khama III Memorial Museum on May 27. To mark the milestone occasion, the Botswanan museum will host a two-day international summit alongside the exhibition opening, in partnership with both the University of Sussex and the University of Botswana, to bring together global experts on cultural repatriation and indigenous heritage.