Baby Stealing Pastor Ordered to be Extradited Back to Kenya
After a four-year legal battle, a London-based evangelical pastor accused of abducting children from a Kenyan hospital is set to be extradited, the U.K. home office said Wednesday.
The self-proclaimed archbishop, Gilbert Deya, belongs to a controversial church in Peckham, South London, where he was reportedly promising infertile and post-menopausal women that he could help them receive “miracle babies” from God.
All they had to do was travel to shabby little clinics in Kenya and “give birth.”
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At the same time, a newborn would disappear from a local hospital.
Deya is accused of stealing five little children from hospitals in Nairobi between 1999 and 2004, according to officials.
“What unraveled was clearly a child trafficking situation, that didn't just involve my constituents, but involved a number of women making their way to Kenya and then arriving back into our country apparently thinking these children were theirs but they clearly were not," a local MP, David Lammy, told the BBC.
The politician knew a woman who had received such a "miracle baby" from Deya.
Lammy also told The Guardian that Deya is a “modern-day snake-oil salesman who has conned and betrayed his vulnerable congregation. He is a very dangerous man who should have been removed from this country a long time ago."
Deya has been charged with child abduction since 2007, and was awaiting a decision about his extradition, though, as BBC reported, that did not prevent him from running (at a distance) a successful charity establishment back in Kenya.
Deya's wife, Mary, has been in a Kenyan jail for four years now, according to The Guardian. In 2007, the newspaper reported, she was convicted of stealing a baby and spent two years in prison. She was also accused of kidnapping a child in September 2005.
Now that the extradition order has been issued, Deya will face child abduction charges in his country.
Back in 2004, when asked about the “miracle babies” on national television, Deya said that the "miracle babies which are happening in our ministry are beyond human imagination.”
He added that he cannot explain the phenomenon, because the children are “of God” and “things of God cannot be explained by a human being."
The Facebook page of Gilbert Deya Ministries describes him as “a dedicated servant of God with an anointed ministry."
"Many lives have been touched and changed as a result of his teaching and ministration," the page says.
