Kenya: Bishop Was Killed During Robbery

[Ebusitanus]

What can one say besides pointing out the total worthlessness of helping out these savages?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlates...143863,00.html

Friday July 15, 2005 7:01 PM


AP Photo NAI102
By TOM MALITI
Associated Press Writer
NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) - An Italian Roman Catholic bishop shot to death in an impoverished area of central Kenya had escaped previous attempts on his life, police said Friday, adding that the case was being investigated as a possible botched robbery. Two people were being questioned.
The 76-year-old bishop of the Isiolo pastoral center, Luigi Locati, was gunned down Thursday evening while walking with a guard to his house from a dining hall for Catholic clergy.
The six assailants hit the guard on the forehead with a blunt object, deputy police Commissioner Lawrence Mwadime said. Locati ran, but the men caught him, hit him in the head and then shot him in the neck. The assailants then fled.
Locati was alive when police found him but died later at the district hospital, Mwadime said. The deputy police commissioner said two people were being questioned in the killing, but he declined to give details.
Earlier Friday, police spokesman Jaspher Ombati said the killing was being treated as an act of an attempted robbery.'' He said police were considering other motives as well, but he did not elaborate.
The Catholic Information Service for Africa reported Friday there had been at least two other attempts to kill Locati. A colleague also said the bishop had received threats.
Locati was attacked in September by two men waiting in his house, and a small explosion occurred outside his residence in March, according to the Catholic news agency. Mwadime confirmed that Locati had been attacked before.
Church officials said Locati went to Isiolo, 125 miles northeast of the capital, Nairobi, more than four decades ago to help people in the remote, impoverished area.
He did this regardless of their faith and practice,'' Archbishop Raphael Ndingi Mwana'a Nzeki told Associated Press Television News on Friday.
Nzeki said the church provides most medical services and schools in Isiolo.
For our hard work, their (the killers) gratitude is the death of our bishop,'' Nzeki said. All I can say is may God forgive them and enlighten them to see the foolishness, the stupidity of what they are doing.''
Locati recently announced he was stepping down and was awaiting his replacement, but he planned to stay in Kenya as a missionary, according to Monsignor Franco Givone, head of the Vercelli Missionary Center near Locati's hometown in Italy's northern Piemonte region.
Givone said that Locati, a friend for 20 years, had been threatened before.
There are tensions and difficult moments in the area and he had been threatened already,'' he said.
He said jealousy would sometimes flare over perceptions one group was being helped while others were being left out.
Isiolo sits in a flat, dry part of Kenya that is populated by people who are largely nomadic, moving their herds of goats, sheep, cattle and camels - according to the season - to the nearest green pasture.
The area has few natural resources and has been neglected by successive governments with limited presence of either security forces or other government departments.
Locati was born in Vinzaglio, a village in northern Italy, on July 23, 1928. He was ordained in 1952.
He came to Kenya in the early 1960s and began his work as the parish priest in Isiolo. He was appointed bishop in 1995.
Givone said the bishop had worked in training and education in Kenya and vowed to keep up that work upon retirement.
When I asked him a month ago what he was planning to do, he said: 'You know I won't go back. I will continue to be a missionary in some village here in Kenya,''' Givone said.
Locati was the second Roman Catholic priest to die violently in Kenya in less than a year. On Nov. 25, 2004, assailants killed Irish priest the Rev. John Hanon when they broke into his house in Matasia, a few miles southwest of Nairobi. Police arrested 10 suspects in the killing of the 65-year-old Hanon and recovered some documents stolen from his house, but no one has been charged in the case.

[Menydh]

Originally Posted by Ebusitanus

What can one say besides pointing out the total worthlessness of helping out these savages?

In a few days, my father will be going to an Irish mission in Ethiopia to do surgery there.

I think that it is fair that people go there to help, though I question that in the grand picture such help has a real impact. In any case, what worries me most now is a man of his age (late 60s) going to such areas.

By the way, before anyone wonders, he is nothing of a pro-multiculturalist. Rather the opposite.

[Ebusitanus]

A very good childhood friend of mine went to one of those countries with "Medicos sin fronteras" and while he worked like an animal day and night there, he came back quite depressed as he told me, realitzing that he was doing, in the great view of things, more harm than good.
The problem is that we are bringing XXI Century medicine to a stone age people who can not take advantge of what is getting offered.
Nature had always found a way to make the check books there ballance out and the natives played along those rules. From ten infants born maybe three reached adulthood due to diseases and alike. Now, with our good hearted medical help, its seven from those ten who survive and grow. Problem is that these primitive nations have not the means and infrastructure to support such a medical success. This leads to overpopulation, war, crime, fight for those scant resources. The effect is that the surplus population, having to choose between starving and leaving their country, choose the later and here we have them reaching our shores in increasing numbers.

Yes, thats what he told me and I see the horrible logic in it.