Rape-Murder Case Puts Kenya Tourism on Trial : Africa: Defense lawyers say the two rangers accused of the crime are scapegoats for an official cover-up.

Two rangers in Kenya’s most important game reserve went on trial Monday for allegedly raping and murdering a British tourist in 1988, a case that has already dealt a severe blow to the country’s worldwide reputation as a tourist haven.

Jonah Magiroi and Peter Kippeen face death by hanging if convicted of killing Julie Ward, who was 28 when she drove her jeep into a muddy gully in a remote corner of the Masai Mara Game Reserve, the country’s most popular tourist spot.

Kenyan prosecutors allege that the rangers, stationed together at a post 2 1/2 miles from the gully, invited her to radio for help from the post but then kept her confined for up to a week before killing her and trying to burn her remains.

The case has attracted wide attention overseas, particularly in Britain, because Ward’s father has alleged that the Kenyan government tried to cover up the crime in hopes of preserving the tourist trade. Police officials originally contended that Ward had been attacked by wild animals when she unwisely left her jeep.

But the father’s private investigators showed that official autopsy reports and other evidence had been doctored to obscure indications of a human assault. A government inquest later confirmed that Ward had been murdered. Kippeen, 27, and Magiroi, 29, were arrested after a Scotland Yard investigation identified them as the likely killers.

Since then, the case has taken on a more overtly political tinge: The defense lawyer for the two rangers is James Orengo, a leading dissident and opposition politician who says he intends to turn the trial into an expose of political corruption in the country, arguing that Kippeen and Magiroi are being sacrificed to obscure the involvement of influential government officials in the crime.

Orengo himself was late for the trial’s opening Monday as he first had to appear before a magistrate hearing charges against him for spreading anti-government rumors. That case stems from a news conference last month at which Orengo and other opposition leaders charged that President Daniel Arap Moi was planning to turn over the government to a military junta in order to forestall an electoral defeat in upcoming multi-party elections.

Orengo will have a willing audience for his corruption charges--some two dozen reporters from British newspapers, tabloids and broadcasters have come here to cover the trial.

The horde nearly turned the opening session into pandemonium as camera operators and photographers swarmed into the courtroom to get shots of the two defendants sitting handcuffed together in the dock with their heads bent low. Photography is not permitted in Kenyan courts, and the cameras were ordered out as soon as Justice Fidahussein Abdullah took the bench.

In his opening statement, prosecutor Salim Dhanji disclosed the most serious physical evidence yet found to implicate the two rangers: strands of Caucasian hair found by Scotland Yard forensic examiners amid piles of refuse and sweepings taken from the huts occupied by the two defendants.

No such discoveries were made in huts occupied by any other rangers at the post, Dhanji said, adding that the defendants had insisted under interrogation that no Caucasian woman had visited the post during the period in question.

But the hair may not be enough to convict the rangers; investigators acknowledge that they cannot be directly linked to the defendant or to her presence at the post during the week in September, 1988, between her disappearance and the discovery of her remains.

All other evidence against the rangers is circumstantial. They were the only two people on duty at the post and were responsible for patrolling the area. Both also lied about their whereabouts, Dhanji said, denying that they had left the post during the week of Ward’s disappearance.