A male Kenyan death row inmate in Saudi Arabia has been released after he spent over 10 years in prison, an official with the East African nation’s foreign affairs ministry said.
Per BBC, Stephen Abdukareem Munyakho’s release came after his mother Dorothy Kweyu spearheaded an extensive campaign to prevent his execution. Kenya’s Foreign Affairs Principal Secretary, Korir Sing’oei, took to X to announce that Munyakho had been released through a “judicial decree.”
Munyakho was handed the death sentence in Saudi Arabia after he was found guilty of killing a colleague from Yemen in 2011. In Saudi Arabia, people convicted of murder are sentenced to death. But the family of the man Munyakho killed ultimately agreed to be paid blood money, which is called dihya.
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Per Islamic law, which Saudi Arabia observes, there can be a commutation of a death sentence if the family of the deceased victim agrees to be compensated with blood money. The Kenyan government and the Muslim World League, which is a charity, gave Munyakho’s family $1 million at the beginning of the year, according to reports from local media in the East African nation.
Munyakho was in his early 20s when he relocated to Saudi Arabia to find work. He worked at the Red Sea tourist resort as a warehouse manager. In a previous interview with BBC, Munyakho’s mother, who is a veteran journalist, claimed that her son and his Yemeni colleague got into an altercation.
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Kweyu said the Yemeni colleague used a letter opener to stab Munyakho before her son reacted by attacking him with the same item. Munyakho’s colleague died from that attack.
Munyakho was previously handed a 5-year prison sentence in 2011 after he was found guilty of manslaughter. But his conviction was upgraded to murder following an appeal, resulting in him being sentenced to death.
Munyakho was previously slated to be executed on multiple occasions, but interventions from Kenyan officials put that on hold. Kweyu said she reacted to her son’s release by rolling “on the floor.”
“This satisfaction is going to be with me for a while,” she said, per the Star newspaper. “This time, it is true. The ambassador [in Saudi Arabia] has confirmed it.”
Following his release, Sing’oei said Munyakho went to Mecca to observe the Muslim pilgrimage. The date for his return to his native Kenya was, however, unknown at the time of this report.
