The UK has extradited a self-styled Kenyan pastor, who claimed he created miraculous pregnancies, to Kenya to face child-trafficking charges.
Gilbert Deya’s extradition came after he failed in his decade-long legal battle to remain in the UK. Kenya’s government alleges he stole five children between 1999 and 2004. He has denied the allegation.
Concerns were first raised about the conduct of Mr Deya, who ran a church in London, in a BBC investigation in 2004.
Infertile or post-menopausal women who attended the Gilbert Deya Ministries church in Peckham, south-east London, were told they could have “miracle” babies.
But the babies were always “delivered” in backstreet clinics in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi. Mr Deya later moved to Scotland, and was arrested in Edinburgh in 2006.
When the BBC asked him at the time how he explained the births of children with DNA different to that of their alleged parents, the 65-year-old Mr Deya said: “The miracle babies which are happening in our ministry are 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.” Kenya’s police spokesman Charles Owino told the BBC that Mr Deya had arrived in Nairobi aboard a Kenya Airways flight following his extradition.
He is due to be charged in court with child trafficking. Mr Deya had opposed his extradition, saying he feared being tortured and sentenced to death.
