Priest's Death in Kenya Clouded by FBI Findings

NAIROBI -- Far from providing the final word on the violent death of a crusading American priest, an FBI report on the shotgunning of the Rev. John Kaiser has come under widespread criticism from the very parties it was intended to reassure.

The FBI was summoned to Kenya last August, soon after Kaiser's body was found with the back of his head blown away and his shotgun lying close by. Kaiser, a human rights activist and critic of President Daniel arap Moi, had made powerful enemies in Kenya's government and had received death threats. The U.S. Embassy, wary that the official investigation into Kaiser's death would disappear into the murk that has obscured probes into the violent deaths of other government critics, pressured the Kenyan government to invite in the FBI.

But more than two months after an FBI team publicly presented its Final Report Into the Death of Father John Kaiser, the situation is muddier than ever.

The report's surprising conclusion was that Kaiser, 67, committed suicide. Agents and U.S. diplomats knew that the resistance friends and relatives bring to any suicide finding would be magnified in the case of a doctrinally conservative Roman Catholic cleric in a church that regards self-destruction as a mortal sin.

But embassy officials acknowledged that the situation has been aggravated by the 80-page FBI report, which critics call contradictory and incomplete and that embassy officials concede is flawed. Its findings have been rejected by Kaiser's family, Kenya's Catholic bishops and Sen. Paul D. Wellstone, the Democrat from the priest's native Minnesota who originally requested the report.

The document fails to address several potentially troublesome details and leaves out some key facts, including the length of a shotgun used in the alleged suicide and of the arms of the man who supposedly used it.

"We are very disappointed," said Gibson Kuria, a human rights lawyer who suggested the FBI was reluctant to implicate Kenya's government or police because of the crucial assistance they provided in apprehending suspects in the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings here and in Tanzania. "We feel this inquiry was political rather than scientific."

The FBI supervisor who led the investigation acknowledged that a longer report might have headed off second-guessing. But Thomas Carey, who headed the FBI inquiry, said the report "went way beyond what we normally do."

"Conspiracy theorists, they're going to abound no matter what you do," Carey said.

At the heart of the matter is the autopsy conducted on Kaiser by Kenyan government pathologist A.O. Olumbe in the presence of seven observers.

Examining the massive head wound, Olumbe noted "stippling" on Kaiser's scalp caused by filler from the fatal shotgun shell. Quoting the medical reference book Gunshot Wounds, Olumbe wrote that the stippling, plus the absence of soot, indicated the 12-gauge shotgun could have been as far as two to three yards away when fired.

In other words, someone else could have killed Kaiser.

To challenge that implication, the FBI summoned Vincent J.M. Di Maio, author of Gunshot Wounds, and now medical examiner for Bexar County, Tex., which includes San Antonio. Di Maio did not see Kaiser's body, but reviewed the autopsy report (which he termed "very good") and 27 color photos from the morgue (which he termed "deficient in that there are no clear close-up photographs of the wound of the head").

Critics ask why that did not stop Di Maio from contradicting Olumbe, dismissing the absence of soot as inconclusive and noting that the stippling on Kaiser's scalp indicated a muzzle distance no greater than a yard.

Blood on the priest's pants, Di Maio said, indicated that he had lined up the gun behind his ear, then reached back to fire it. Based on what the FBI had told him about the priest's "erratic behavior" as well as the forensic evidence, "I would classify it as a self-inflicted shotgun wound," Di Maio concluded.

Others remain unconvinced, in part because of what Kenyan bishops termed the "rather difficult contortions" involved in shooting oneself in the back of the head. Carey, the FBI supervisor, said the report should have made clear the FBI's belief that Kaiser held the gun in front of him while pointing the barrel near his ear.

But Ling Kituyi, a general practitioner who witnessed the autopsy as head of the Independent Medico-Legal Unit, which specializes in human rights investigations, said she was equally bothered by evidence ignored in the report.

Kaiser's fingernail clippings, which the autopsy team specifically bagged for examination by the FBI lab, went unexamined. (Carey said the clippings were corrupted by being bagged together.) The report also failed to explain two bloodstains Kituyi called suspicious: a trail of blood running down the back of Kaiser's right hand, and bloody fingerprints above his right pants pocket.

If the blood on his hand had come from the fatal wound, gravity would have pulled it in a different direction given the position of his body, Kituyi said. As it is, the stains together suggest an earlier blow to the head, which the priest then clutched with his right hand. She said that, on a body with no other wounds, evidence of the blow would have been destroyed by the shotgun blast.

"There must have been some bleeding before death, unless he shot himself and put his hand in his pocket," Kituyi said.

Carey said the stains were "generally consistent" with other blood spatter evidence indicating suicide.

Critics point out other omissions, including the lack of fingerprint or ballistics reports. The most common criticism, however, is that the FBI arrived at the crime scene three days after Kaiser's death. In reporting that there were no footprints or tire tracks indicating the presence of anyone but the victim, FBI officials acknowledged that they were relying on evidence gathered by Kenyan police, the very agency whose lack of credibility had made it necessary to call in the FBI.

There is no other official account of the crime scene, because the autopsy team was not allowed access to it. And although FBI officials called Kenyan police work at the scene adequate, the officers failed to retrieve all of the priest's remains. Two weeks after Kaiser died, a nun presented Kituyi with a skull fragment more than two inches square. The nun had wanted to keep it as a relic, as part of a campaign to make Kaiser a saint.

Embassy officials, who spoke on condition they would not be identified, said they do not expect the controversy to recede.

"The FBI was invited in because we thought he was murdered and we thought we were going to catch a big fish," said one embassy official. "We knew when the suicide theory reared its head that that was the worst possible outcome. The FBI does expect people to trust them. They're not prepared for the Kenyan mind-set that engages in conspiracies everywhere."