Drama queen Joyce Akinyi arrested in Nairobi West drug bust – PHOTOS
Controversial Nairobi businesswoman Joyce Akinyi has yet again been arrested by anti-narcotics police for allegedly being in possession of two kilogrammes of heroin.
Ms Akinyi is said to have been nabbed in the wee hours of Friday by detectives who had been trailing her movements and activities following numerous reports that she had continued with her drug business despite previous arrests and cases pending before court.
She is being held at Muthaiga police cells.
Informers say that during her arrest, she had fake Congolese passports bearing her photos but different names and nationalities.
In one of the passports, she identifies herself as Eveline Kambere, born in Goma, Congo and has her hair shaven.
The second passport bears a name, Marline Kambuba Mape, with the same birthplace but wearing a weave with blond edges on the photograph.
This is the fourth time the queen of drama is being arrested over suspected drug trafficking.
In the latest arrest, police said Ms Akinyi and a Congolese had two kilos of heroin valued at Sh3 million.
In 2015, detectives arrested her and three others with a suspicious powder but they were later released.
In 2013, Ms Akinyi and Budalang’i MP Raphael Wanjala were arrested by police in Isinya along the Nairobi-Namanga highway on claims of drug trafficking.
They were later released after they insisted they were carrying maize flour that they had imported from Tanzania.
Akinyi came into the limelight after she was involved in multiple public squabbles with her estranged husband, a notorious Nigerian businessman Antony Chinedu, who was deported in June 2013 on suspicion of being a drug trafficker.
Chinedu, who had been in the country for 15 years, shot into the limelight as a wealthy but shadowy tycoon embroiled in a bitter battle for property running into hundreds of millions of shillings with Ms Akinyi in 2008.
The parents of two, who formalised their marriage in 2004, owned the popular Deepwest Restaurant off Nairobi’s Lang’ata Road, among other investments.
Three years later, the Nigerian moved to court seeking to divorce Ms Akinyi over cruelty, adultery and desertion of their marital home.
In the suit, Chinedu accused Mr Wanjala of flirting with his estranged wife and annexing his Sh300 million property, claims that the legislator denied.
The acrimony between the couple played out in an embarrassing tragicomedy of love gone sour, with Ms Akinyi at one point referring to Chinedu as a “drug lord wanted in Pakistan” and warning him that he would eventually go.
Then, in October 2008, Mr Wanjala and Ms Akinyi were arrested at New Delhi’s Indira Gandhi Airport on allegations that they were part of a money laundering racket. Police found the equivalent of Sh7.5 million in US dollars on them. India requires one to declare amounts of money above Sh375,000.