Gilbert Deya: Kenyan ‘miracle infants’ pastor dies in highway crash

Controversial Kenyan televangelist Gilbert Deya, who claimed he created miraculous pregnancies, has died in a highway crash.

Police instructed native media that Deya died on the spot on Tuesday night after his automobile was concerned in an accident with a college bus and one other automobile close to the city of Kisumu in western Kenya.

At the least 30 different folks had been reportedly injured, together with an individual recognized as his spouse and a passenger in his automobile, and 15 college students within the bus.

Deya, who ran a church in London, rose to infamy within the early 2000s, following his declare that he may assist infertile {couples} conceive “miracle” infants by prayer.

Investigations later linked his church to an alleged child-trafficking ring, resulting in his arrest and extradition from the UK eight years in the past after a decade-long authorized battle.

He was acquitted of the costs in 2023 because of inadequate proof.

On Wednesday, Siaya County Governor James Orengo mentioned he had learnt with “deep sorrow and remorse of the passing on of Bishop Gilbert Deya”.

He confirmed that the “horrific” highway accident had concerned a automobile belonging to the county.

Images shared on-line confirmed the mangled wreckage of one of many autos, which was fully shattered within the accident.

A former stonemason-turned evangelist, Deya moved from Kenya to London within the mid-Nineteen Nineties, the place he based Gilbert Deya Ministries, a registered charity with branches throughout the UK and Africa.

He was recognized for his charismatic preaching model and claimed to have been consecrated as an archbishop by a US evangelist in 1992.

His ministries later confronted a number of investigations by the UK authorities for alleged mismanagement and authorized violations, together with promoting olive oil which had been falsely claiming to have therapeutic properties.

He was as soon as described by UK Overseas Secretary David Lammy, then an MP, as a “modern-day snake-oil salesman who has conned and betrayed his weak congregation”.

At his church, determined ladies, some previous their menopause and others who had been unable to conceive, can be satisfied that they’d turn out to be pregnant by prayer.

However the infants had been all the time “delivered” in backstreet clinics in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi. The prosecution mentioned the infants had been stolen from poor Kenyan households.

In 2011, his then spouse Mary Deya was jailed after being discovered responsible of stealing a child from the primary referral hospital in Nairobi and falsely stating she had given start to the infant.

Deya would later inform a court docket that that they had divorced after she had been charged, saying she had “tarnished” his title.

Current movies from the YouTube web page of Gilbert Deya Ministries seem to point out him asserting that he has a brand new spouse, Diana Deya.

When the televangelist was requested in a BBC investigation in 2014 how the alleged “miracle” youngsters had totally different DNA to that of their alleged dad and mom, he mentioned it was “past human creativeness”.

“It’s not one thing I can say. I can clarify as a result of they’re of God and issues of God can’t be defined by a human being,” he mentioned.

After his acquittal in 2023, Deya continued along with his spiritual outreach programmes till his loss of life, reportedly at 72.