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Kenya

Man jailed for life after raping daughter

NYERI, June 12 – An incestuous father was handed a life imprisonment in a Nyeri court on Thursday for defiling his stepdaughter and impregnating her.

Senior Resident Magistrate Rose Otieno condemned Johnson Karoki Muiga to spend the rest of his life in jail after the court proved beyond reasonable doubt that he was responsible for the six month-old foetus in his 14-year-old daughter’s belly.

Using the evidence of doctor’s reports and five witnesses brought to testify against Muiga, Otieno said the law’s only provision for such a situation was a life sentence.

She further said that although Muiga claimed the accusations against him were a fabrication, he had failed to controvert or rebut the testimony that was credibly and truthfully put against him.

The Magistrate said the trauma occasioned on the young girl by the man she looked up to as a father was too much for her to consider him as a first offender, a point that had been brought to her notice by the prosecution.

But Muiga maintained that he was not responsible for his stepdaughter’s pregnancy and accused his wife of framing him to settle scores after a domestic disagreement.

However Otieno disagreed, and noted that the testimony by the girl was moving, as she was candid and unshaken during the cross-examination.

The Magistrate observed that every fact read out in court corroborated the evidence given by the complainant, and hence the court was certain that Muiga had defiled the girl.

In the teenager’s testimony, the court heard that on two occasions Muiga asked the girl to accompany him as he rode his bicycle to Kiganjo market for shopping, and on their way back, he ordered her to alight and forcefully defiled her in a thicket.

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It further heard that she was threatened with eviction should she disclose the issue to anyone.

When she started getting morning sickness due to the pregnancy, the court heard that the standard six mother-to-be, her siblings and her mother were thrown out of Muiga’s house.

During mitigation, Muiga tried to plead with the court to pardon him, because he had two wives and a child with psychiatric problems.

He pleaded that he was a poor man and the sole breadwinner.

The convict had been charged with two offences; that between the months of July and August 2007 at Karugongo village in Nyeri, he defiled his daughter and indecently assaulted her contrary to section 20 (1) of the sexual offences act 2006.

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