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Pastor Gilbert Deya

LONDON. — United Kingdom-based Kenyan televangelist Gilbert Deya has been charged in a London court with a string of sex related offences.
According to the UK’s Guardian Newspaper, the self-styled “miracle babies” preacher was charged with three counts of rape and one count of attempted rape against a woman.

He was further charged with an additional count of sexual assault by indecently touching a 14-year old girl.
Pastor Deya (61) appeared before a Camberwell magistrates court last Friday and was remanded in custody to appear at inner London crown court for a preliminary hearing on 8 November, said the paper.

The self-proclaimed Archbishop of Gilbert Deya Ministries, which claims a UK membership of 36 000 is not new to controversies since publicly proclaiming that he can help infertile women bear children.

Pastor Deya has been battling his extradition to Kenya to face charges of child abduction, claiming that he cannot receive fair trial before the Kenya courts.

In September 2011, UK Interior minister Theresa May ordered that the preacher be returned to Kenyan authorities after he exhausted all his avenues of appeal but nothing came of it as the matter died down.

Pastor Deya had claimed that extraditing him to Kenya would be a breach of his human rights since he would not get a fair trial following accusations that he stole five children aged between 22 months and four-and-a-half years between 1999 and 2004.

His “miracle babies” saga came to light in 2004 when his conduct was aired on the BBC Radio 4 investigative programme “Face the Facts.”
It was alleged that infertile or post-menopausal women who attended his church in Peckham, South London, were told they would have “miracle babies.”

He explained the births of children with DNA different to that of their alleged parents as the work of God, saying that the “miracle babies” were 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,” said Pastor Deya who added that he had enabled 22 infertile and menopausal women to have “miracle babies.”

His wife, Mary Juma Deya faced similar charges of child abduction and was in 2004 jailed for two years by a Kibera court for abducting a two-year-old baby.

Mrs Deya was jailed in 2009 for three years after she was found guilty of abducting a three-year-old boy.
She was however acquitted in other allegations of abducting five other children in 2011.

The family’s controversies did not end there as their adopted son, Paul Otieno Deya was charged with the murder of his three-year-old boy and the attempted murder of his wife in 2009.

Paul was suspected of having killed his son Wilson and stabbing the boy’s mother, Jacqueline Achieng Otieno in a ferocious knife attack at their home on Lynton Road, Southwark, South East London before turning the knife on himself. — Daily Nation.