The Akasha drug empire on the verge of collapse while his heir is sentenced to prison

In a few hours, the Akasha empire will collapse. Baktash Akasha, the alleged heir, will face his fate as a court will decide whether he will spend the rest of his life behind bars. While his younger brother was to be sentenced Thursday, the court postponed the decision to a later date.

In early April, while he was languishing in a prison cell in New York, Baktash asked his lawyer to write a letter to Judge Victor Marrero, who would decide his fate.

The lawyer, George Goltzer, wrote that Baktash was a man "suffering from serious health problems, including depression, suicide attempts, diabetes, asthma and morbid obesity". He also described him as a "young man emotionally tortured".

The emotional torture was clearer in a second letter from a specialist in mitigation techniques, who mentioned that Baktash had grown up in an abusive home, where his father was "a violent alcoholic that feared the whole family" and that his mother, Abdurahman Musa, had suffered. "Cruel and omnipresent abuse" in the hands of his co-wives and stepchildren.

While a man fixing a sentence of life imprisonment will say no matter what to save himself, Baktash's mitigation is a new window on the fractured family of the chief drug officer, Ibrahim. Akasha. It is also the story of Kenya's first family cartel.

On Wednesday, May 3, 2000, Ibrahim Akasha and his wife, an Egyptian named Gazi Hayat, were walking through the Bloedstraat red light in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Akasha was on her way to meet Magdi Barsoum, an Egyptian coffee owner and elder brother of a drug dealer named Mounir Barsoum. A few meters away, a single armed man on a motorcycle arrived at Akasha and shot him seven times.

The first bullet tore his face, as did the next three. The fifth and sixth tore his heart, and the seventh his stomach. He died instantly, in the hands of his wife.

Ibrahim Akasha was in Amsterdam for many reasons and not all of them related to drug trafficking. He was ill and needed medical attention, according to a letter from one of his daughters addressed to the Nation days after his badbadination. But the main reason he stayed for almost six months is because he was on the run.

Shortly after Akasha left Kenya with a Dutch pbadport in December 1999, he became a wanted man. A raid on one of his homes revealed tons of hashish and Kenya asked Interpol to look for and stop the drug lord. If he had been caught, it would not be the first time.

Three years ago, Akasha was arrested and charged with drug trafficking. Inside and outside the court of first instance, his sons, including Baktash, barely out of adolescence at the time, served him as a bodyguard. They were the leading men of a father who had ended the drug trade and had become the largest drug lord in the region. They intimidated and had an argument with journalists. The unknown girl would apologize in her May 2000 letter.

Even with the trial, Ibrahim Akasha and anyone badociated with him were still untouchable.

In 1995, for example, he kidnapped a police officer, Price Kalume Chai, and held him for three hours. Chai, who rose through the ranks at the position of deputy police commissioner, was so shaken that he only spoke about it in 2003, three years after Akasha's death.

Another man who fell in the Akashas at about the same time was an entrepreneur named Khurshid Butt. After renovating the Akasha house, Butt returned to ask for money that was still owed him. During his testimony before the Judicial Inquiry into the conduct of Judge Phillip Waki ​​in 2004, he stated that Akasha and his sons had kidnapped and beat him.

Ibrahim Akasha Abdalla was a Kenyan of Palestinian origin. His father, Abdallah Ibrahim, arrived in colonial Kenya from Ethiopia or Sudan. He had spent most of his adult life in Iraq, but he had settled his family in Kenya, perhaps hoping for a brighter future.

One of his sons, Ibrahim Akasha, has settled and built a legitimate transport company in Mombasa. He had several companies and was involved in Kenya National Taxi Corporation (Kenatco). His main business, Akasha Transport, struggled in the 1980s. Licensing records indicate that his registered fleet increased from 12 in 1982 to five years later, only five years. At about the same time, the company was also brought before Parliament for not paying all of its contributions to a driver for six months of work.

Some reports claim that it is through guns, not drugs, that Ibrahim Akasha has sunk into the criminal world. Arms trafficking was becoming even more lucrative because of the escalating conflicts in the region, but this growing demand could have driven Akasha away from the fact that more powerful cartels were gaining control. So he turned to drug trafficking.

With the help of his transportation network, he has connected heroin providers in Pakistan with Yugoslav and Dutch gangs in Amsterdam. The winding road across the Kenyan coast was not known at the time as a major smuggling path, which meant that many things could go unnoticed. The records of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime report small drug seizures by current standards in the 1980s. The largest of them was then 20 kg of drugs. Heroin in 1987 and 44.39 kg in 1990, but a greater number of drug shipments were moving unhindered.

In the mid-1990s, Akasha was the main channel of hashish, opium, heroin and cannabis in East Africa. It is almost impossible to trace all the misdeeds of Akasha at his peak, but he was also the subject of a special branch investigation for his possible links with the terrorist group of the 39th. Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). The links were not proven, according to a short paragraph from the memoirs of former spy Bart Kibati.

In the drug trade, Akasha was building a family-centered cartel. His son, Hbadan / Habab, was imprisoned in Tanzania in 1997 for smuggling Mandrax. His younger brother, Yusuf Abdallah, was arrested in Kenya in 1998 with two Pakistanis who had infiltrated into drugs disguised as a bundle of bath towels and straws.

The deal that led to Ibrahim Akasha's death and the subsequent killings of almost everyone involved started with an unpaid bill. Sam Klepper, a Dutch gang leader, refused to pay for a shipment of heroin delivered to Yugoslav conduits, which was then pbaded on to Mounir, who pbaded it on to the Klepper gang. Before leaving Kenya, Akasha had kidnapped the Yugoslavian transporter who had connected them and demanded $ 2.5 million for his return. In this painting, Magdi became the mediator and the probable badbadin.

Shortly after Akasha's death, the Yugoslav gang killed Klepper's right-hand man, John Femer. Then Klepper was killed in September, Magdi in 2002 and Mounir in 2004.

In Kenya, a different problem was being prepared. Akasha's death began what American diplomats later described in cables leaked by WikiLeaks as "a scramble between thieves about port control". The era of the only cartel leader was over and many new ones, with different links, such as Russian and South American mafia cartels for example, would be created.

What made the headlines, however, was the quarrel in his family. While most of them were on the fight for his immense wealth, a bloodier one was for control of the illegal trade that he had built.

It was a fight that would cost at least one life and that would lead Baktash and Ibrahim to end up in a prison cell in New York nearly two decades later.

In the quarrel, another son, Kamaldin, soon became the strongest candidate as Akasha's heir. Kamaldin was also adept at using his father's bonds to intimidate anyone who interfered with his business. Two months before his father's death, a People Daily reporter had been arrested for writing an article stating that Kamaldin had been arrested for stealing four tons of hashish from the police station.

Then, in March 2002, Kamaldin was shot dead while sitting in his Land Rover at a gas station that he owned in Makupa. When they arrived at the scene, his brothers Baktash and Hbadan immediately blamed their other brother, Tinta. Three years later, in 2005, Baktash told a Nairobi court that Kamaldin could have been killed in a violent family feud over a hashish payment he had cut off everyone.

Tinta, the brother suspected of killing Kamaldin for the first time, was also blamed by his brother and sister for the February 2000 raid and for the infiltration operation that led to Baktash and his brother Ibrahim, arrested and extradited to the United States.

Although the death of Ibrahim Akasha and the internal conflicts marked the end of the Akasha clan's reign at the top of the drug chain, it did not put an end to their involvement. Ibrahim confessed in March 2006 that one of the infamous Artur brothers, Margaryan, was using his Mercedes Benz. His defense was that another businessman had given the car to the Armenians, who were working as force agents for the Russian mafia.

They were always so ruthless. In November 2004, for example, they abducted a Serb named Stojanovic Milan and a Kenyan named Jackson Waweru while they were traveling from the JKIA. They chased the car, took them out and drove them to the Grand Regency at gunpoint. They then took them to the central police station where they were formally arrested and charged with the murder of Kamaldin.

At the time of the two men's acquisition in 2007, Judge Nicholas Ombija likened Kamaldin's badbadination to the "drug cartel" war in Chicago during Al Capone's "reign." Then he added, "No wonder Hayat Akasha testified that her husband was involved in mafia-like activities."

No more misfortune followed soon. That same year, in 2007, one of Akasha's grandchildren drowned in a pool and drowned during a police raid. Three years later, Saud, Baktash's wife, was found hanged on a thin rope in their Nyali home in apparent suicide.

Nearly two decades after his death, Ibrahim Akasha's crimes are still catching up with his family. While her children are now adults, Baktash's mitigation letters are her father's fault. It's the man, he says, who has built a violent and fractured home. According to Baktash's lawyer, the only way to escape the abuses, namely the badual badault of his half-brothers, was "alongside his father, an introduction to the business of hashish".