Mr Bridges, 71, was stabbed repeatedly after he and his son Bruce were ambushed as they drove on Tuesday to their mine, 190 miles southeast of Nairobi. The murder was the culmination of a three-year battle with squatters stealing rare tsavorite gems, first discovered more than 40 years ago by Mr Bridges, a senior jewel consultant with Tiffany and Company in New York. "They had dragged thorn bushes across the road and as soon as we got out of the vehicle, eight of them came running towards us, screaming "We are going to kill you all," Bruce Bridges, 32, told The Daily Telegraph in Nairobi. "They had machetes, spears, bows and arrows, heavy wooden clubs and we had a couple of clubs, no real weapons. "One guy went at my dad with a spear, my father grabbed the end of the spear and held it away from him. Right as that happened I saw another run up and stab my father. "I went to the man with the spear who was right above my father, he tried to get me, I hit the spear out of his hand and chased him into the bush. "When I ran back another one came at me with a machete and got me across the right side of the neck. Thank God it's nothing bad at all." Two of their Kenyan colleagues were "cut to ribbons" but survived. His father was fatally wounded. "I looked down and he didn't look good, he was pale and I knew it was bad. I put him in the back of the truck and drove as fast as I could to the hospital," said Mr Bridges. However, doctors pronounced his father dead on arrival. His body has been flown to Nairobi, his home for the last 30 years. Campbell Bridges was born in Scotland but travelled to Africa in the late 1960s to explore for rare gems only then being discovered along the Kenya-Tanzania border. Soon after he arrived, he and his wife lived in a tree-house 25ft above the ground to keep clear of wild animals roaming the territory where he was prospecting. He was the first to bring tanzanite to the West, earning him a consultancy with the famous Tiffany's jewellers in New York. He later found the first deposits of tsavorite, a green gem more brilliant than an emerald, in the hills around Taita Taveta in Kenya, and staked a claim which his company still mines today. Last year he was honoured with a lifetime achievement award from the International Colored (CORR) Gemstone Association, of which he was a founding member. But despite a court last month confirming that his mining licence was valid and approving his prospecting rights, he had recently come up against powerful local figures who wanted him off his mine, Bruce Bridges said. "We had been receiving death threats for quite a while, this whole thing has been going on for three years," he said. "We told the police all about it, but they didn't do anything, we're pretty sure they were being ordered to drag their heels by the higher-ups. "My father knew Africa, he knew that if you give these people your hand, they want to take your arm, then your leg, then your head. They will stop at nothing to have their way." A police spokesman in Voi, the provincial capital closest to the Bridges' Scorpion mine, said that the authorities were investigating "the unfortunate death of a white miner". He refused to comment on Bruce Bridges' allegations of a lack of police action on the earlier death threats. The British High Commission in Nairobi was "ready to offer whatever assistance is necessary", a spokesman said.Machete mob murders British gemstone miner in Kenya
Campbell Bridges, a renowned British gemstone mine owner, has been murdered in the Kenyan bush by a gang of illegal prospectors armed with machetes, spears and bows and arrows.
Friday, 14 August 2009
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