A Kenyan court has found the housemate of slain LGBTQ activist, Edwin Kiptoo, also known as Chiloba, who was killed in 2023, guilty of high-profile murder.

Eldoret High Court, which gave the ruling on Wednesday, found Jacktone Odhiambo, a freelance photographer, guilty of the murder of Chiloba, nearly a year after the shocking murder, which sparked global condemnation in the LGBTQ community in the conservative East African nation.

The court found Odhiambo guilty of intentionally causing Chiloba’s death, meeting all the requisite elements of murder under Section 203 of the Penal Code.

The body of Chiloba was found in a metal box in the western city of Eldoret in early January 2023 and shortly after, Odhiambo was arrested and charged with the crime while the police believed he had been in a relationship with Chiloba, and was accused of carrying out the murder between the night of December 31 and January 3, 2023.b

The prosecution led by Mark Mugun, presented evidence from 23 witnesses, including DNA profiles that linked the suspect to the crime.

Autopsy results revealed Chiloba died from asphyxiation, with investigators uncovering his body stuffed in a metal trunk on January 4, 2023, along a roadside in Eldoret.

Five people were arrested in connection with the murder of Chiloba including Odhiambo, who reportedly was a close friend and Chiloba’s partner.

The prosecution relied on key evidence which included DNA extracted from Chiloba’s body and personal items, showing a mixture of his blood and the suspect’s own, while testimony from the government chemist further solidified the link, detailing the genetic analysis of materials recovered at the crime scene.

The Office of the Director of Public Prosecution confirmed the ruling in a posting on X.

“My client has been found guilty of murder,” Sammy Mathai, Odhiambo’s lawyer, told reporters.
“We are going back to court on Dec. 16 for sentencing.”

France has begun the repatriation of over 3,500 archaeological artefacts to Ethiopia after they were taken from the county in the 1980s to Paris for study.

French Foreign Minister, Jean-Noel Barrot, who handed over two prehistoric stone axes, called “bifaces”, and a stone cutter to Ethiopia’s Tourism Minister Selamawit Kassa, during a visit to the national museum in Addis Ababa, noted that the gesture stemmed from the two countries longstanding bilateral agreement on cooperating in the fields of archaeology and palaeontology.

The artifacts which are stored at the French Embassy in Addis Ababa, will be delivered to the Ethiopian Heritage Directorate on Tuesday, Kassa said.

“This is a handover, not a restitution, in that these objects have never been part of French public collections,” Laurent Serrano, Culture Adviser at the French Embassy, said during the handover ceremony.

“These artifacts, which date back between 1 and 2 million years, were found during excavations carried out over several decades at a site near the Ethiopian capital,” he added.

The tools are “samples of nearly 3,500 artefacts from the excavations that were carried out on the Melka Kunture site”, a cluster of prehistoric sites south of the capital that were excavated under the direction of a late French researcher, Barrot said.