British man charged in Kenya with trafficking cocaine

A British national has been charged with trafficking nearly 100kg of cocaine that was impounded last week at Kenya's main seaport.

Jack Alexander Wolf Marrian denied the charge in court in Nairobi on Thursday.

The prosecution opposed bail, saying Marrian is a flight risk. The court will rule on the bail application on Monday.

A second suspect, who police have said is Kenyan, was expected to be charged later. It was not clear what happened to a third suspect, also Kenyan, who police had questioned earlier.

The seizure was a rare one in Kenya, which the UN and the US say has become a cocaine distribution hub in recent years.

Traffickers from South America are said to take advantage of Nairobi's extensive air links to Europe and Asia.

Traffickers also exploit Kenya's long Indian Ocean coastline and lack of adequate security controls at the port of Mombasa, the state department's 2016 drug control strategy report says.

Stemming this flow of drugs is a challenge for Kenyan authorities, the report says, citing "corruption within the Kenyan government and business community ... High-level prosecutions or large seizures remain infrequent".

For more than a decade, Kenya's police have been named annually by the local chapter of the global anti-corruption watchdog Transparency International as the most corrupt institution in the country.

AP