Bartholomew's Notes

From the BBC:

A controversial pastor who claimed he could give infertile couples “miracle babies” has failed in a bid to avoid extradition on child abduction charges.

Two High Court judges have rejected Gilbert Deya’s appeal against the order to extradite him to Kenya.  Mr Deya, the self-proclaimed bishop of a church in Peckham, South London, says he faces torture in his native Kenya.

The Kenyan government alleges Mr Deya stole five children between 1999 and 2004.

I’ve blogged on this tragic story several times in the past: as I noted a year ago, Deya claims that his 57-year-old wife – and a number of female congregants – had given birth to “miracle babies”, conceived through prayer and brought to term after a few weeks. Interestingly, women who sought such pregnancies were obliged to travel to Deya’s clinic in an impoverished district of Nairobi, where they were anesthetised before being presented with a baby. Some of the duped women have since had the trauma of having “their” babies removed by the authorities in Kenya and the UK. I gave a fuller account of Deya’s background – including his production of videos with titles like Jesus Healed a Woman with Three Breasts – here.

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PS: One detail I included in my earlier postings was the supposed claim by Deya that he had cut a deal with the Kenyan Orange Democratic Movement to have the charges dropped and to become Kenya’s High Commissioner to London. Of course this was never going to happen, although I figured that Deya may have made such a boast. However, it must be noted that my source for this was the now-notorious African Press International. The API’s mysterious “Chief Editor Korir” (actually apparently “Sammy Korir“) gave us one of the more entertaining sideshows of the recent American election campaign with a series of broken promises to release a tape recording of Michelle Obama sounding off to him indiscretely over the phone about “white racists” and letting slip evidence of Obama’s birth in Kenya. Korir now claims that someone at Fox News has suppressed the recording, and he has a new promise:

API will now sue Fox News Network for damages and at the same time air the Michelle Obama tape. She has to answer to the American People.

Judging from the dramatic decline in comments, though (down from a thousand to just ten), it appears that Korir’s readership has drifted off, and even WorldNetDaily has lost interest [UPDATE: I spoke too soon – Korir now seems as popular as ever].

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