EX-CONVICT TELLS OF HOMOSEXUALITY IN PRISON

Nairobi

An ex-prisoner yesterday told of a harrowing life of misery,
homosexuality and drug abuse at the Shimo La Tewa prison.

Odhiambo Migot, who was released last week after serving seven months
in the remand prison, described the prison as a veritable hell-hole
where prisoners are forced into homosexuality, bhang is smoked
liberally and where their lives are endangered by gangs who operate in
cahoots with the prison warders.

Hard drugs are freely available and bootleg, of the kumi kumi variety,
is drunk in the jail, "just like in a bar."

Migot narrated how a gang of prisoners serving long sentences and who
are known as Trustee Prisoners force other inmates into homosexuality
with the full connivance of warders.

Young men are literary raped by gangs of sex starved homosexuals, he
told the East African Standard, some are beaten up for resisting and
are sodomised when they are almost unconscious.

"The Trustee prisoners are very powerful in Shimo la Tewa. They sell
drugs to prisoners, they organise sodomy for inmate clients and some
are very violent to newcomers.

It is a Mafia in there that operates prison crime," he said. The
Trustees are in-charge of the distribution of food during meal times.

"If you refuse to succumb to their advances they plan with the warders
to starve you until you give in," he says.

In the face of powerful and violent hard-core criminals, fresh inmates
are usually left with no choice but to join in the vicious web of
crime in the prison, and to give in to the sexual demands of the
trustee prisoners.

"Many have given up, they do not even scream, they give in and just
cry later," said the ex-prisoner who, however, declined to say if he
was subjected to the inhuman act.

Any comment on his part, he shyly told our reporter, would cause him
embarrassment.

But Coast Prison Commandant Mr Samson Quantai, when contacted, denied
the allegations.

He, however, pledged to investigate the complaints.