Kenya Orders 9 More Missionaries Out of Country Over Alleged Plot

The government Wednesday ordered nine more missionaries--eight Americans and one Canadian--out of Kenya, the U.S. Embassy said.

The missionaries have been accused of plotting to topple President Daniel Arap Moi’s government. Kenya deported seven U.S. missionaries on similar charges on Friday.

In Washington, State Department spokesman Charles Redman dismissed the coup charge as “patently absurd.”

“The reports of the alleged plot appear to be based on a memo which we believe to be a forgery,” he added.

“The whole thing is a fraud. There is something really rotten here,” said Dick Hamilton, one of the ousted missionaries.

Hamilton, 50, is Kenya director of the Oregon-based East African Christian Mission and deputy secretary of the Associated Christian Churches of Kenya.

Also being deported from Hamilton’s mission in the western Kenyan town of Kitale are his wife, Jane, 48, their adopted Kenyan son Louis Loluem, 11, his brother-in-law, James Heberling, 56, of Lebanon, Ore., and Leroy Hawn, 52, of Anchorage, Alaska.

The other missionaries ordered to leave are Justin Sylvester, a Canadian resident of the United States, with his American wife Diane and their two children; Americans George and Victoria Lacey with their two children, and another American missionary identified as Gilford Van Smith.

The U.S. Embassy on Tuesday said the alleged plot, reported by Kenyan newspapers as financed by the Ku Klux Klan and an American church, was a hoax or part of a fraud being investigated in the United States.