---
title: "Britain’s Army in Kenya Has a Perfect Defence, and That’s the Problem"
description: "Sovereign immunity has kept decades of serious allegations against British troops out of Kenyan courts; that wall is now under challenge"
author: "Nate Ledger"
published: 2026-10-03T13:18:37Z
modified: 2026-10-03T16:46:48Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/britain-s-army-in-kenya-has-a-perfect-defence-and-that-s-the-7c5798
language: en
tags: ["uk", "kenya", "military", "immunity", "war", "europe", "africa"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# Britain’s Army in Kenya Has a Perfect Defence, and That’s the Problem

*Sovereign immunity has kept decades of serious allegations against British troops out of Kenyan courts; that wall is now under challenge*

By Nate Ledger · October 3, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/britain-s-army-in-kenya-has-a-perfect-defence-and-that-s-the-7c5798

## In brief

- BATUK has trained some 10,000 British troops a year in Kenya under a 1964 defence deal; none has been prosecuted there
- Noldonyo Piro says soldiers beat and raped her and killed her pregnant sister Mantoi in the mid-1990s
- A 2003-2006 UK inquiry logged over 2,000 rape allegations but found no prosecutable evidence, calling some of it fabricated
- A redacted military report showed rib injuries and a British battery near Mantoi’s grave; a blacked-out section covers Kenyan police enquiries
- A Kenyan court rejected BATUK’s immunity claim in 2022; the unit appealed and the fight continues

There is a principle of international law called sovereign immunity: one state cannot be sued in another state’s courts. It exists for good reasons — diplomacy would be awkward otherwise — but in Kenya it has also functioned as a wall. British forces have trained on Kenyan soil under a defence agreement signed in 1964, months after independence, and the British Army Training Unit Kenya, or BATUK, still trains around 10,000 soldiers a year in Laikipia and Samburu. According to [an Al Jazeera investigation](https://www.aljazeera.com/features/longform/2026/10/3/britains-military-in-kenya-allegations-immunity-and-a-fight-for-justice), the allegations documented by Kenyan communities and investigators against its soldiers over the decades include rape, murder, children fathered and abandoned, deaths and severe injuries from unexploded ordnance, environmental destruction and fatal vehicle collisions. There is no known case of a British soldier being prosecuted in Kenya. The UK has invoked sovereign immunity, and for decades that went untested.

One of the cases is Mantoi Lekoloi Kaunda’s. In the mid-1990s, her sister Noldonyo Piro — then about 15 — was herding the family’s goats and sheep near Archer’s Post in Samburu County with Mantoi, 16 and about six months pregnant, when white soldiers approached. Piro told Al Jazeera that one chased her, struck her on the back of the head, stood on her arm until it snapped, and raped her until she lost consciousness. When she woke, covered in blood, Mantoi lay nearby, lifeless. Their father, the late Kaunda Lekoloi, told ITV that he went out searching. “I found Mantoi covered in blood. I could see that she was dead. There were two sets of soldiers’ boot prints in the dust.” He carried her home on a donkey and buried her the next morning. No police post was within reach; as Piro put it, “There was no one to tell.”

The family included lions, cheetahs and elephants among their ordinary fears. “After that day, I became more scared of white men than I was of lions,” Piro says. No one has ever been charged over Mantoi’s alleged murder.

The case might have stayed buried. In 2003, hundreds of Maasai and Samburu women came forward alleging decades of rape by British soldiers, suing for negligence under UK law on the argument that commanders had known of problems since 1977 and failed to act. The Royal Military Police opened Operation Tasker in March 2003; by October 2004 it had logged more than 2,000 allegations of rape and sexual violence spanning four decades.

Kenya’s Criminal Investigation Department handled Mantoi’s case, and her father consented to her exhumation — a grave cultural taboo in Samburu tradition. A pathologist told ITV the rib fractures suggested a forceful blow, possibly from a boot; experts recovered hair from her lower body, including an unidentified pubic hair. “The findings so far tend to agree with the claim by Mantoi’s sister that they were attacked by a British soldier,” said Gideon Kibunja, the detective chief superintendent leading the investigation, adding that investigators hoped the UK would help obtain DNA samples from soldiers who had trained in the area. Her father reburied her and died shortly afterwards, without answers. The investigation went cold. Piro says the family has never been shown the autopsy report.

In 2006, the UK Ministry of Defence announced that Operation Tasker’s three-year inquiry had found no reliable evidence to support a single allegation, and claimed that much of the evidence supplied by Kenyan police and medical authorities appeared to have been fabricated. No one was prosecuted. Investigators also never conducted DNA tests on any of the 69 mixed-race children whose mothers say they were conceived through rape by British soldiers.

The paper trail since is its own kind of evidence. Declassified UK, a British investigative outlet, filed freedom-of-information requests for the MOD’s file on Mantoi’s case. The ministry confirmed it held material but refused to release it, saying the records were scattered and searching them would take at least 14 days — beyond the statutory cost limit of three and a half days’ work — and that there was no way to narrow the request. Last year, after Piro supplied a supporting letter, the MOD released a single redacted Royal Military Police interim summary, which Declassified UK shared with Al Jazeera. It documents seven unhealed rib fractures consistent with injuries at or shortly before death, and a British military-type battery recovered two feet above the grave’s surface — a find to which Kenyan police “appeared to apportion significant relevance.” The British officer who wrote the report disagreed, noting Mantoi had been buried some 9km (6 miles) from where she was attacked: “The importance of this find is not shared by the undersigned.” The section titled The Kenya Police Enquiries is blacked out. The forensic results were pending when it was written; nothing further has emerged.

Asked by Al Jazeera whether that forensic testing was ever completed, and whether soldiers’ DNA was ever compared with samples from the grave, the MOD said the investigation and exhumation “were led by the Kenyan authorities,” with the RMP’s Special Investigation Branch “fully” supporting both, and referred questions to Kenyan police. Kenya’s Directorate of Criminal Investigations, Attorney General and Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions did not respond. Operation Tasker, the MOD added, “is now a closed investigation with no official requests to reopen it.”

Piro, for her part, has stopped expecting an answer. “Nothing ever happens except people coming here, asking me questions, taking pictures and then leaving,” she says. But the legal question her family was never allowed to ask — whether the British Army can be made to answer under Kenyan law — is now being pressed by Kelvin Mugambi Kubai, a 29-year-old advocate of the High Court of Kenya whose grandfather was among the last Mau Mau fighters to emerge from the forest.

The wall has already cracked once. On March 10, 2022, High Court Justice Antonina Kossy Bor rejected BATUK’s claim of state immunity, finding it subject to Kenyan law — a decision the unit moved to appeal, and around which Kenyan authorities arrested five litigants, prompting local outrage, the [Daily Nation reported](https://nation.africa/kenya/counties/laikipia/outrage-as-5-kenyans-in-british-army-case-arrested-3773674); the paper said Kubai was representing 1,496 community members. Pressure has kept building: Kenya’s parliament has held hearings on alleged British army abuses, a fire linked to BATUK training drew more than 7,000 compensation claims over health effects, and the army recently admitted using white phosphorus, [according to OCCRP](https://www.occrp.org/en/news/kenya-holds-hearings-on-british-army-abuses). “The British army has been able to get away with anything,” Kubai told [the Eastleigh Voice](https://eastleighvoice.co.ke/national/73266/kenyan-government-vows-thorough-investigation-into-alleged-british-army-abuses) in 2024.

Notice the logistics of the answer Mantoi’s family has been given. The exhumation was led by Kenya; the prosecution would be a matter for Kenya; the investigation Britain ran is closed; and the courts that might connect those facts have been told, for decades, that the defendant is immune. It is a tidy arrangement, in which every institution can honestly say the work belongs to someone else — and the someone else, so far, does not exist.