A notorious US paedophile who was jailed in Kenya for 50 years but unexpectedly freed last year appeared in court on Tuesday accused of sexually assaulting several children, media reports said.
Terry Ray Krieger had been convicted in December 2014 by a Kenyan court for filming and distributing videos of naked young children, but served only eight years of his sentence.
On Tuesday, Krieger appeared in court in the town of Athi River southeast of Nairobi on charges of sexually assaulting a three-year-old girl as well as being in Kenya illegally and refusing to be fingerprinted.
Magistrate Barbara Ojoo denied bail to Krieger, who is also known as “Guka Terry” or “grandfather Terry” in the local Kikuyu language, describing him as a fugitive from justice.
She dismissed a plea for leniency on the grounds of the wheelchair-bound Krieger’s age and poor state of health.
At an initial hearing on November 10, Krieger had pleaded not guilty, according to Kenyan media reports.
The case is due to come up in court again on November 27.
A prosecutor told AFP that further charges of sexually assaulting another girl and a boy were later laid against Krieger in court and that a bail hearing would be held on that case on November 30.
Krieger, now aged around 68 or 69, was first arrested in Kenya a decade ago after Interpol tipped off local police about an internet user who went by the alias “Babytoddler123” and was circulating paedophile material to overseas users.
Krieger, from the US state of Michigan, had initially denied those charges but changed his plea to guilty.
“The accused has robbed young children of their innocence and it is disturbing that these despicable acts have been going on undetected,” Nairobi magistrate Joseph Karanja said when sentencing him in 2014.
But Krieger appealed the sentence as too harsh and in November last year a judge ordered his release, saying a retrial would “not only be unfair but oppressive”.
Krieger had previously been convicted in 1992 in the United States for criminal sexual conduct with a child under the age of 13, for which he served a number of years in prison.
