After yesterday’s revelations, more news from Kenya about those Armenian Russians from Dubai.
The East African Standard, having survived the government’s censorblitz, reports that, indeed, the two men of mystery didn’t arrive by air as they said, but drove to their press conference at Jomo Kenyatta airport in a government car..
The Standard learnt from a KAA employee that the Armenians – Mr Artur Sargysyan and Mr Artur Margaryan -were driven to the airport, whisked through an electronically -operated secret door into a transit restaurant where they waited for a Kenya Airways plane to land from Dubai. This was to make it appear like one of them had just stepped off the plane.
The operation almost backfired because the plane, which was supposed to land at 6:30am, delayed for 40 minutes.
When it finally landed, the men were moved towards the plane through an emergency and little-used door on the air bridge, 20 minutes after other passengers had disembarked.
A KAA employee shepherded them to the air bridge, the mechanically extendable access to the doors of the plane.
We have also learned that the two men were accompanied by a State House employee, a personal assistant of a National Rainbow Coalition activist and a middle-level protocol officer, who took them to the VIP lounge that is the preserve of ministers, top civil servants, the top cream of the diplomatic and international guests.
Or perhaps they were really Czechs?
The plot thickened when Immigration minister Gideon Konchellah said the men were citizens of the Czech Republic, who had arrived on a private jet. He later issued a statement clarifying that they were Armenian businessmen with permits to be in Kenya.
Time to czech your facts, I think. The company name they gave (“Brotherlinks International”) is a blank on all known search engines, strange to tell. There is an Artur Sargysan at the Armenian ministry of social security, and another who buys things on EBay and doesn’t pay. There’s one who’s been declared bankrupt, here. What about his mate? Well, he’s either a law professor who runs a legal aid clinic for the poor, somehow unlikely, a singer-songwriter, or perhaps even a TV executive. I don’t think they are telling the truth about their identities – do you?
Especially not in the light of this Update!..
Cops come to their place, but guess what? A big boy done it and run away.
Asked who allowed him and his brother to hold a Press conference at the VIP lounge at the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, Mr Margaryan claimed it was the journalists themselves who had diverted them to the lounge as they were walking to the first class lounge.
But when journalists, some of whom were at the Press conference protested they did not have such powers, he contradicted himself, saying it was his lawyers Mr Antony Macharia and Mr Fred Ngatia who had arranged the Press conference…..Asked to explain why his brother’s particulars were missing from the passenger manifest on the flight he claimed he had taken from Dubai to Kenya, he said all passengers from Arab countries used their mothers’ names and not their own or their fathers’….After his brief chat with the journalists, Mr Margaryan returned to his compound and later drove off in a dark blue Subaru whose number plates were hidden behind strips of cardboard. He was accompanied by a woman who on Monday he claimed was his bodyguard.
He muttered, caughtly.