He faces trial for allegedly stealing five children between 1999 and 2004 in Kenya.
NAIROBI, Kenya Aug 4 – Controversial televangelist Gilbert Deya has been deported to face child trafficking charges and abduction in Kenya, police said Friday.
Deya, who has always claimed that he has powers to help infertile couples conceive ‘miracle babies’, arrived at the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (JKIA) in Nairobi on Friday morning under tight security and in handcuffs.
“He has been handed over to the CID who are preparing to take him to court,” Inspector General of Police Joseph Boinnet told Capital FM News, “he was extradited from the UK.”
His wife Mary is already serving a three year jail term over similar charges.
Police officers based at the airport said Deya arrived at 4.40am aboard a Kenya Airways flight.
“He was accompanied by security personnel from the UK who handed him over to us,” one senior officer said.
He was deported after losing a long-standing court battle against the extradition, in which he argued that it would breach his human rights to send him back to his home country.
He faces trial for allegedly stealing five children between 1999 and 2004 in Kenya.
The children were allegedly harboured by Deya and his wife Mary between May 1999 and August 2004 after being taken from their parents without consent.
The allegations first emerged in a BBC report in 2004 which said that infertile or post-menopausal women who attended his church were told they would be having “miracle” babies.
The babies were always ‘delivered’ in backstreet clinics in Nairobi and in at least one case DNA tests showed the baby did not belong to the couple involved.
In September 2011, Britain’s then Interior Minister Theresa May, ordered that Deya be returned to Kenyan authorities after he exhausted all his avenues of appeal.
His extradition was ordered in December 2007 but he filed an appeal.
Deya has been running his Gilbert Deya Ministries operation from Peckham, south London, and says he was consecrated as an archbishop in the United States in 1992.
In opposing his extradition, Deya claimed he was likely to face torture and inhuman and degrading treatment if sent back to Kenya. A British court originally approved his extradition in 2007 and he then fought the decision through higher courts.
His church’s website says it has a membership of more than 34,000 in Britain and claims to be the fastest-growing ministry in the world.
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