A former Kenya Airways air hostess Priscilla Jemutai Kolongei convicted and jailed in 2002 for drug trafficking is dead.
Jemutai died at the Kenyatta National Hospital on December 30 after an illness.
An obituary on the death said she will be buried at her Ainabukoi home in Uasin Gishu on January 9. A requiem mass is planned at the Citam church Valley Road on January 7 from 10 am.
Kolongei, 59, and a single mother of one was freed from Lang’ata Women’s Maximum Prison in 2015 after serving 13 years of her 18-year sentence.
She was released five years early for good conduct.
Her high-flying career came crashing down on the afternoon of March 2, 2002, after a Kenya Airways flight from Mumbai touched down at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport.
In her luggage was a parcel she had been given in India to deliver to somebody waiting at JKIA.
The package would turn out to be 27 kilogrammes of heroin worth Sh27 million at that time.
Anti-narcotics police officers had been tipped off and were waiting to pounce on her. Journalists were at hand to capture the moment.
The then air hostess had been unwittingly lured into drug trafficking back in 1997 by friends, she told the BBC Swahili Service in an interview.
Whenever she went out of the country on official assignment, she would ferry items said to be medicine and clothing for friends, and they would pay her a token of appreciation.
In time, they told her she had been unknowingly ferrying drugs, but asked her to continue and offered to pay her more.
She needed the money.
By the time of her arrest, she had amassed considerable real estate, had four hefty bank accounts and was planning to put up two grand homes, one for herself and the other for her retired parents.
A brother was about to enroll in one of the finest piloting colleges in the US, courtesy of her liaison with drug barons, when the rug was pulled from beneath her feet.
Her arrest highlighted Kenya as the end destination or transit point for designer drugs such as heroin, hashish and cocaine.
Two weeks after her arrest, Kenya Airways dismissed 32 of its cabin crew suspected to be drug couriers.
On November 6, 2002, a Nairobi court handed her the harshest sentence ever to a drug trafficker – 18 years behind bars.
The magistrate, Wanjiru Karanja, also fined her Sh10 million or an extra year in jail. However, her legal team led by Cliff Ombeta, who had feared the worst, expressed relief when the sentence was delivered.
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