page_title: John Anthony Kaiser
section_title: Death and aftermath
hierarchical_section_title: John Anthony Kaiser / Death and aftermath
caption_attribution_description: English: Memorial to John Anthony Kaiser at St. James Catholic Church in Maine Township, Otter Tail County, Minnesota
context_page_description: John Anthony Kaiser was a Roman Catholic priest and Mill Hill father from Perham, Minnesota, US, who was assassinated near his mission at Morendat, in western Kenya.
context_section_description: On August 23, 2000, Kaiser was shot in the back of the head with a shotgun, at close range. His body was found at 6 am the next day beneath two acacia trees by a butcher named George, at Morendat junction on the Nakuru-Naivasha road in western Kenya. He was carrying documents he intended to present to the Akiwumi Commission. He was also to testify against the Moi government before the International Criminal Court in the Hague in three weeks. The first police officers on the scene thought he had been murdered.
  Less than a week after Kaiser's death, Florence Mpayei dropped her rape case against Julius Sunkuli.
  Kenya's chief government pathologist and a pathologist from an independent human rights organization present at the autopsy thought Kaiser was killed from a muzzle distance of about 3 feet (0.91 m), from which suicide would be impossible. However, an FBI expert from Texas, who did not examine Kaiser but only saw photographs, concluded that Kaiser had committed suicide. The Moi government readily agreed.
  Both houses of the United States Congress passed a joint resolution calling Kaiser's death "an assassination", and calling for the US State Department to investigate.
  The papal nuncio, Giovanni Tonucci, said at Kaiser's funeral in the Nairobi basilica, "The church, through pitiless violence, has once more been deprived of one of her ministers. Let no one have any doubts about it: we are celebrating a religious occasion; we are reflecting on a religious assassination, not a political one. Fr. Kaiser has been murdered because he was, and in the eternity of God still is, a Catholic priest who preached the Gospel. Those who killed him, those who planned his killing, wanted to silence the voice of the Gospel."..."Only two days before his death, I met Fr. Kaiser for a long conversation. At the end, he asked my blessing, which I reluctantly gave him. At that moment, I thought it would have been better if he, an old and worthy missionary, had blessed me. How much more I am convinced of that now that we look at him as a martyr of the faith?" Also present at the altar was Maurice Cardinal Otunga, Archbishop Emeritus of Nairobi.
  The Law Society of Kenya renamed its annual award the Fr. Kaiser Human Rights Award. A new Kenyan government was elected in 2002. Since then, the Kenyan National Human Rights Commission posthumously honored Kaiser with its 2006 Milele (Lifetime) Achievement Award. Kaiser also posthumously received the Twin Cities International Citizen Award from the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul in 2000, and the Lumen Gentium Award from St. John's Preparatory School in 2004.
  Correspondent Carol Marin and producer Peter W. Klein of the American news program 60 Minutes conducted an investigation into the death of Kaiser, which put pressure on the international community to solve the mystery of how he died.  The Kenyan government reopened the inquest into Kaiser's death at the request of the Kenyan Episcopal Conference. The inquest ended on June 12, 2007, after hearing from 111 witnesses. The presiding magistrate, Maureen Odero, said on August 1, 2007, that Kaiser was murdered, ruled that the "Suicide Theory" was based on a preconceived notion, but stated that "she could not – on the basis of evidence tabled before her in the inquest – point out with certainty who the priest's killers were".
caption: Memorial at his home parish, St. James in Maine Township, Otter Tail County, Minnesota
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