Before his tragic death on June 17, 2025, Gilbert Deya was living a low key life, after decades of making headlines in Kenya and UK over child trafficking allegations.
Deya met his death after being involved in a road accident along the Bondo-Kisian road, that left at least 30 others, including students nursing injuries.
Who was Gilbert Deya?
The controversial preacher was born in February 1937 in Juja, Kiambu County, where his father was a sisal plantations worker but his family hails from Bondo, Siaya county.
His schooling faced challenges at Primary level because of bullying and poverty. He dropped out of school and began preaching in Jinja, Kampala and working as a porter.
Deya’s endless Controversies
While in Uganda, Deya reportedly beat up a woman who had hit his sister’s children and just at the of 21, he married his wife Mary Anyango, who was 14 years old, and therefore a minor. They however had 15 children.
In 1976, he launched Salvation of Jesus Christ Church. His evangelism in Kenya spread to the 1990s before he relocated to the United Kingdom and established the Gilbert Deya ministries in 1997.
The ministry was doing well that it began acquiring property in Liverpool, London, Birmingham, Nottingham, Luton, Reading, Manchester and Sheffield. In 2006, it got a building and planning permit in Leeds with the church claiming to be the fastest growing ministry in UK and worldwide.
The ministry also claimed that Deya had powers of making infertile women become pregnant hence the miracle babies scandal. One particular case was that of a woman who allegedly got 3 children in less than a year.
The woman was said to have travelled from UK to Kenya to ‘give birth’ but suspicions arose upon her return to UK, leading to investigations and court proceeding to protect the babies.
In November 2004, Deya’s wife was arrested in Nairobi and charged with stealing children. 10 children were found under her custody and it was confirmed that they were not biologically related to the family. DNA conducted on the alleged mothers of twenty other children also didn’t match and the young ones were placed in a foster home in Kenya.
Mary was arrested alongside Rose Atieno Kiserem, who worked as a pastor in Deya’s ministry. When Atieno was released from jail, she confessed that the miracle babies was a hoax created to dupe unsuspecting Christians.
A warrant was arrest from Kenyan authorities was then issued against Deya, who was still operating in UK then. The Kenyan police accused him of trafficking babies outside the country, seeking UK to extradite him so that he could face child trafficking charges.
In January 2011, his wife Mary was convicted and jailed for stealing a baby from Kenyatta National Hospital in 2005 and making a false statement that she had given birth to the baby in question.
In 2013 Deya was arrested in the UK and charged with raping, attempting to rape a woman and sexually assaulting a teenage girl. He was however found not guilty on all counts in 2014.
After years of court battles and asylum seeking, Deya was eventually extradited to Kenya in August 2017.
He was acquitted of the child trafficking charges in June 2023 due to lack of evidence by magistrate Robinson Ondiek.
“Today I’m acquitted of this kind of burden, a yoke on my shoulder… it has damaged my reputation. It is sad that I have been labelled as a child stealer. I’m grateful that I’m free. I’m now going to continue to proceed to the mission that Jesus gave to me on earth,” he told the media after being set free by the court.
