Fear of divorce may have sparked murder

Paul Otieno Deya may have stabbed his four-year-old son to death on Monday after his wife Jacqueline Achieng Otieno asked for a divorce, it emerged on Thursday.

Sources privy to Deya family matters told the Nation that Paul could have killed his son for fear of losing him to his wife in a custody battle.

“Mrs Otieno wanted a separation from her husband... she wanted custody of the children,” said a close family member who sought anonymity.

Paul, 31, is suspected of killing his son, Wilson Deya and stabbing his 28-year-old wife at their home in Southwark, South East London on Monday evening.

On Thursday, it emerged that at the time of the son’s death, Paul’s wife was not in the house. She returned in the evening to find her son dead in a pool of blood.

Paul is alleged to have slashed his wife’s throat before trying to cut his own.

The couple’s 17-month-old girl, Valerie, was unharmed in the horrific attack. She is now in the custody of Southwark Social Services. Paul was arrested at his hospital bed on suspicion of murder.

A Metropolitan Police spokesman said Paul remains under police guard in South London hospital after undergoing surgery for stab wounds to his neck and body.

He is an adopted son of Bishop Gilbert Deya, a London-based Kenyan controversial preacher who is wanted back home on child trafficking charges.

Pronounced dead

It also emerged on Thursday that the Deya family in London is unaware of the location of Paul, who has been placed on 24 hours police guard in an undisclosed south London hospital.

Sources who went to console the Deyas at their Peckham home in South London told the Nation that the family had no idea which hospital their son was being treated.

“Deya and his family are devastated by the tragedy. They have not seen Paul since the incident happened on Monday evening,” said a family member.

Police officers arrived at the Lynton Estate flat at 6.15pm on Monday evening to find the body of the four-year-old boy. Neighbours had dialled 999 after hearing a furious row at about 6pm on Monday.

Wilson Otieno, 4, was pronounced dead at the family’s first-floor flat. A postmortem examination carried out on Thursday at Great Ormond Street hospital in London confirmed that the boy had died of a knife wound to the neck.

Jacqueline was taken to hospital suffering a stab wound to the neck. She has since been discharged and is being looked after by her adopted West Indies family in Peckham.

The death is being investigated by officers led by Detective Inspector Keith Braithwaite, based at Stratford Police Station in East London.

The couple married in 2005 at Deya’s London church, which Deya officiated.

Mr Sam Ochieng, Director of SACOMA, a London-based NGO said the Kenyan community in the UK was in deep shock.

“This is a real tragedy, everyone is asking what compelled a normal family man to kill his own son in cold blood?”

Meanwhile it emerged on Thursday, that British Home Office was reviewing Bishop Deya’s extradition order to Kenya.

A well placed source told the Nation that Home Office lawyers were reviewing the decision to extradite Bishop Deya to see whether it breaches his human rights.

The controversial preacher’s lawyers had written to the Home Office protesting that the extradition of their client was in breach of European Convention on Human Rights.

Extradition order

The Home Office said: “Deya has exhausted his statutory avenues of appeal against extradition. We then received representations alleging extradition would breach his human rights.”

Bishop Deya is fighting extradition to Kenya in a complex and costly legal tussle in British courts. It is believed the legal costs amounted to more than £1 million (Sh124 million).

Bishop Deya, who runs his worldwide Gilbert Deya Ministries from Ormside Road, Peckham, with 34,000 followers in the UK alone, is now a failed asylum seeker currently ordered to report weekly at Deptford Police Station in South London.

Impeccable sources told Nation that Bishop Deya’s extradition is not a question of if but when, and he could be extradited from London before Christmas.

The preacher is wanted in Kenya on five counts of abducting children aged between 22 months and four-and-a-half years between 1999 and 2004.