Brothers to spend 18 years in jail for dispossessing orphans
Two brothers will spend 18 years in jail after a Nyamira Court found them guilty of plotting to dispossess orphans of their ancestral land in Kisii County.
The two were handed a two-year term for each of the nine counts, which they were charged with before Keroka Senior Resident Magistrate Kimutai Matata.
The sentences will be running consecutively.
The brothers, Samuel Mogaka Nathan, a policeman and Kennedy Mairura Nathan, a civil servant in Bungoma County, were charged before Magistrate Matata that on unknown dates in 2012 in Masaba South sub county within Kisii County, jointly and with others not before court, had forged a Transfer of Land form in respect of LR: Nyaribari Masaba/Bonyamasicho/1828, purporting it to have been signed by Joseph Birundu, an uncle to the orphans who was by then the administrator of the property.
False document
They were also charged with, uttering a false document, forgery of Lands Control Board consent letter, falsifying documents related to transfer of land ownership and making government documents without authority.
Seven prosecution witnesses convinced the court that the two were involved in the two offences.
Wycliffe Anyona told the court two had involved him as a witness in a land sale matter but all the documents, including the land sale agreement, which was under scrutiny, were bearing falsified impressions of his signature.
Edwin Omwebu, 19, one of the three orphans those fighting for their four-acre land that was left in the elder uncle’s hands testified in court and said his father never sold the land.
The boy’s aunt, Eunice Barongo, who has been taking care of them since 2014 when the father died also said her brother was a beggar and always depended on his sisters.
“My brother never had money and he always begged from us(his sisters) even until the day he died,” Barongo told the Court.
I find both the accused persons guilty as charged in respect to all the nine counts and I will convict them accordingly.
