Former Kenya Airways air hostess walks to freedom after 13 years in jail

Priscillah Chemutai Kilongei who is serving an 18 year jail term for drug trafficking with her lawyer Martin Obuo in2005, she is set to be release after 13 years

NAIROBI: Priscilla Chemutai Kolongei, the former Kenya Airways air hostess convicted and jailed in 2002 for drug trafficking will be set free Monday.

Kolongei, 49, and a single mother of one, will walk out of Lang’ata Women’s Maximum Prison at 9am after serving 13 years of her 18-year sentence. She is being released five years early for good conduct.

On a cold Thursday mid-morning, The Standard on Sunday paid her a visit at the facility for an interview.

The officer in charge, Mrs Olivia Obel, had told us earlier that she had flatly declined our interview request, “but you can come and try to convince her yourselves.”

Clad in a heavy orange sweater and starched blue blouse, her hair well-permed and dyed brown, with a touch of grey on the sides, Priscilla cut the figure of an affable, likeable mother.

“I have said everything I had to say to the media,” she said of her decision not to grant us an interview, a decision emphasised with a vigorous wave of hand.

Priscilla’s 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 last year.

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.

MAKE AMENDS

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.

“What happened happened and that is it. I want to go home quietly. I don’t want any more media attention. Please,” Kolongei said on Thursday.

As she firmly closed the door to the interview, she tried to make amends for the team’s disappointment. “Talk to them first then we can meet later,” she said as she walked off.

“Them” were Francseca Ngina and Susan Mutongoria, two women serving life sentences for murder.

Francesca was sentenced in 2004 for the murder of her husband.

Susan, a mother of five, was convicted in 2006 for the murder of her one-and-a-half-year-old daughter, her sixth and last born.

Francesca, the more talkative of the two, told us she was framed by her husband’s relatives, but she accepted her charge.

“All that is in the past now. I am now saved,” she said.

We were talking to the two women as our guide, a gracious warder named Doreen, tried to locate Priscilla.

She had to be drawn away from her relatives who had paid her a visit ahead of her release. One of the reasons given for the intrusion was a ‘trustee’ meeting.

‘Trustee’ is a prison term given to long-term convicts who have exhibited good behaviour.

One of the privileges of being a trustee is that one is free to move about the prison because they are not considered a flight risk.

MOST EDUCATED

It is the system’s way of affirming faith in inmates – an assurance that despite how dark their sins might be, they have a chance of redemption, if not in the outside world, then there within the prison walls.

There are only 12 trustees at Lang’ata Women’s Maximum Prison, which holds nearly 700 inmates, and Priscilla has been one of them.

In terms of superlatives, she exceeded them all: She was the most known of them, the most educated, the most travelled and the most exposed.

Doreen left us with Ngina and Susan to look for Priscilla. The two talked, but it was hard to really listen to them. This was not their day.

While we were anxiously waiting for Doreen to appear with Priscilla, sharp screams from an adjacent brown building drew our attention.

“Don’t worry,” said Ngina. “Those are death row convicts. They do that sometimes, but it is nothing. Prison has a way of getting into your head.”

And it is precisely this that we wanted to ask Priscilla – how has prison changed her? Did it break her spirit or does she come out a much wiser person? If only we could get her to talk.

“There she is,” said Ngina, as she pointed to a short lady sandwiched between two young men and two men. The group was making its way along one of the prison paths.

“That’s her family. They have come to prepare her for her release. That’s good,” said Ngina, with a wistful look.

“My family abandoned me when I lost my appeal. No one remembers me any more. People give up on you in prison, especially if you are on death row.”

At the time Priscilla was sentenced, her daughter was five years old. Could she be one of the two women she was with? One of them bore a strong physical resemblance.

One of the questions we planned to ask her was the kind of relationship she has had with her daughter from behind bars. But we did not get a chance to ask the question.

About ten minutes after she went to look for her, Doreen appeared with Priscilla. The woman we had been waiting to meet greeted us warmly but said, “I know you have come for an interview but, no. I don’t want it.”