60 Minutes

Was Missionary's Death A Suicide?

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

May 16, 2001 / 5:25 PM EDT / CBS

As the U.S. Congress investigates the FBI's latest mistakes in the Oklahoma City bombing case, critics say the Bureau also may have erred in concluding that an American Catholic missionary who was critical of the Kenyan government committed suicide. Sen. Paul Wellstone, D.-Minn., and a former ambassador to Kenya, Smith Hempstone, are among those who cast doubt on the FBI report concluding that the Rev. John Kaiser was most likely a suicide. CBS News Correspondent Carol Marin reports.

"This report troubles me... It's much more likely [Kaiser] was murdered," says Wellstone, who commissioned the report. "What shocks me... is that the FBI didn't put equal weight to the fact that he could very well have been murdered," he says. The 67-year-old Kaiser belonged to the Mill Hill Order of missionaries and was found dead of a shotgun blast to the back of his head beside a road outside of Kenya's capital, Nairobi. His truck was found some distance away in a ditch and his shotgun was found next to his body.

Local police at first believed it was murder, says Sister Nuala Brangan, a friend of Kaiser and one of the first on the scene. "[Police] showed where the brake was off, that the car had been put into a gully and the people there all felt murder," she says. Sister Brangan says Kaiser may have been killed for evidence he was compiling that linked the regime of Kenyan President Daniel arap Moi to ethnic cleansing that had harmed his parishioners.

Former Ambassador to Kenya, Hempstone explains that ethnic cleansing is a way to prevent the opposition from voting. "Its objectives are to push people of other tribes out of the area…by burning villages, by killing people," he says. Hempstone says only a Vatican inquiry concluding suicide will satisfy him, due to the corrupt nature of the Kenyan government, which aided the FBI in its investigation and was present for most of the Bureau's interviews. His skepticism about suicide "is considerable…mainly because of the record in Kenya for the past 20 years," he says.

That record includes the mysterious deaths of four other clergymen in Kenya and the case of President Moi's foreign minister, Robert Ouko. Ouko fell out of favor with the government and was found dead in 1990. Authorities at first said Ouko, found with a broken leg, a bullet in the head and with burns on his body, was a suicide, but withdrew the claim later.

Hempstone also points out that Kenya and the U.S. have drawn closer since the terrorist bombing of the U.S. embassy there and church officials and people opposed to Moi's government say the U.S. cannot afford to anger its partner in the war on terrorism by declaring Kaiser's death a political assassination. But Tom Carey of the FBI says the Kenyan police have done nothing to impede its investigation and that the bureau is acting independently in its conclusion. "There's no vested interest here on the part of the FBI to lie or shade the truth," he ays.