A son of former President Daniel Arap Moi has emerged as the prime suspect in the 1988 murder of Julie Ward, a 28-year-old British woman who was brutally killed in the Maasai Mara Game Reserve.
Ward, who has long been the subject of headlines, was found with most of her body burned. However, parts of her left leg, fragments of her jaw, and her skull remained intact.
While officials initially attempted to claim she had died by suicide, been mauled by animals, or even been struck by lightning, it quickly became evident she had been murdered. A new investigation by The Telegraph has confirmed that her death was indeed a homicide.
Ward's family has revealed new evidence indicating that the UK’s Metropolitan Police, who were invited by then-President Moi to assist in the investigation, interviewed a key witness in 2011 who provided a major breakthrough in the case.
According to the family, the witness gave a detailed account of events that implicated the eldest son of the former Kenyan president in Ward’s murder.
The family, which has been hoping to get justice almost three decades later, however, revealed that there could have been a collusion between the Kenyan government and the UK to keep the details of the incident hidden to protect the diplomatic ties between the two nations.
Ward, who until the time of her death was allegedly with the son of the former Head of State, at the time of her disappearance, was later discovered dead in the game reserve.
According to a witness statement by a former official at a safari camp in the Maasai Mara, where Julie Ward was found dead, the son of the former president was present at the camp around the time of her disappearance—contradicting his earlier claim to police that he had been nowhere near the scene of the crime.
The family went public with the revelation after unsuccessful attempts to file a complaint against the Metropolitan Police over its alleged mishandling of the case.
Julie’s brother, Bob Ward, told The Telegraph that it was ''unthinkable that those statements with such vital information have been locked away in a safe in Lewisham for all of these years'', adding that the opportunity to secure justice for Julie may now be lost.
According to the testimony from a Maasai Mara camp official, Moi's son and a small party contacted the camp to make a booking in September 1988, around the time that Julie first went missing.
However, the group allegedly arrived late one evening and left unexpectedly the next morning in a way that did not make sense to the camp worker.
According to the reports, Moi's son had previously denied rumours of his involvement in Ward’s murder or being anywhere near the area.
He told Kenyan police in 1997 that he had been at one of his farms, more than 150 miles away from the Masai Mara, throughout that September when Ward died.
