The UK agrees to pay the Kenyans affected by the Loldaiga fire

The UK government has agreed to pay compensation to thousands of Kenyans affected by a fire caused by British military training four years ago.

The output agreement follows a prolonged legal battle, in which 7,723 claimants said they had lost their property and suffered healthy complications due to the 2021 fire in the conservation of Loldaiga in the Kenya Rift Valley.

A spokesman for the British Supreme Commission in Nairobi said the fire was “extremely regrettable” and that the United Kingdom had spent “considerable time, effort and resources” to resolve claims.

The British government did not confirm how much it was paid, but the lawyer in the case told the BBC that it was £ 2.9 million.

Kevin Cubai called it “the best possible result”, despite complaints from his customers that the amounts received are too small to compensate for their losses.

He said that the alternative “would be to continue litigation for another period of nearly seven years to prove these cases of analysis on a case -by -case basis”, which would be difficult as much of the evidence was lost after four years.

Cubai acknowledged that his clients have no medical documents that support their health health claims due to the inhalation of smoke from the Loldaiga fire and that they were also exposed to smoke because they used firewood for cooking.

The United Kingdom Department of Defense said in 2022 that the fire was probably caused by a bearing stove beaten during a training exercise in conservation. He found that about 7,000 acres of private land were damaged, but no community land was directly affected.

Legal actions claim that there was environmental damage in the surrounding communities because of the smoke and the destruction of property due to the stamping of wild animals.

The British government has helped conservation with the restoration of the burned zone and the military exercises are still being held there.

The Conservation of Lllesiga – about 49,000 acres of hilly shrub with the background of the ice -bought mountain Kenya – is part of the Laikipi Plateau, where hundreds of thousands of acres were seized by the British through the colonial era, leading to land disputes that continue until this day.

This is only 70 km (45 miles) of the conservation of the lev, where Prince of Wales offered Kate Middleton in November 2010.

A few kilometers to the south are the newly built NYATI barracks, a facility of £ 70 million, which is part of the British Army Kenya (Batuk) training department.

He hosts thousands of British troops every year for massive exercises in places such as Loldaiga, which offers ideal conditions for harsh environmental training.

Batuk contributes tens of millions of pounds to the Kenyan economy annually.

But over the years, the contradictions about the behavior of some of the soldiers have attracted media attention, including allegations of fatal strokes, killings and sexual exploitation of Kenyan women.