British soldiers cleared on Kenya rape claims

LONDON, Dec 14 (Reuters) There is no reliable evidence incriminating British soldiers in the rape of hundreds of women in Kenya, the Defence Ministry said today in a report dismissed by an advocate for the women as ''a joke''.

During a three-year probe, Britain's Royal Military Police interviewed 2,187 mostly Maasai and Samburu tribeswomen who said they were sexually assaulted by British troops training in Kenya.

The assaults were said to have begun in the 1970s.

But investigators found there was not enough evidence to support criminal prosecution.

''There is no reliable evidence to support any single allegation made which would stand up to the Crown Prosecution Service evidence test and lead to a prosecution against any named individual,'' the police force concluded.

''The British Army has taken these allegations extremely seriously and they have been extensively and sensitively examined,'' Lieutenant-General Freddie Viggers, the army's head of personnel, said in a statement.

The families of the alleged victims said the cases were reported to local police in the former British colony. But British military police said the records were unreliable.

''Much of the information provided by the Kenyan and medical authorities appeared to have been fabricated,'' a Defence Ministry spokeswoman in London said.

In August 2003 the women travelled from their remote homes to the capital Nairobi and demonstrated outside the British High Commission offices carrying their mixed-race children as evidence of the assaults.

Some critics have said the women were actually prostitutes and that their children were conceived through consensual sex rather than rape.

A human rights body representing Maasai women in the case said it would press on with attempts to have the accused men prosecuted.

''There are a number of cases with concrete evidence and even if the British write a hundred reports, justice must be done,'' said Johnson ole Kaunga of Impact, a human rights body.

''They seem to be saying rapes took place but they can't find who did it. They have spent three years and millions of British tax-payers' money just to tell us what they have always said. This is a joke.'' He said Kenyan police were conducting a parallel investigation but they were not available for comment.

The report's findings were subjected to a four-month review and vetting process before receiving the independent backing of Britain's Devon&Cornwall Constabulary.

British lawyer Martyn Day, who represented some of the Kenyan women, was not immediately available for comment.

REUTERS BDP BD1908