UK aristocrat cleared in Kenya drug bust case

Kenya’s High Court has acquitted a British aristocrat of smuggling cocaine in a shipment of sugar, ending a high-profile case that raised concerns over how the justice system would treat the scion of a prominent colonial-era family. The 100kg haul was seized from a shipping container owned by the sugar trader Jack Marrian in Mombasa in July 2016. The Guardian reports that Marrian’s colleague Roy Mwanthi was also charged. Marrian, the grandson of a Scottish earl, has always maintained that they were framed. The prosecution applied to scrap the case over a lack of evidence, but a magistrate in a lower court last month refused to drop the charges. 'The court was in essence directing a prosecution against accused persons against the wish of the prosecution, without a complainant and a prosecutor,' Justice Luka Kimaru ruled yesterday.

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