Obama's Kenyan half-brother arrested on drug charge

Source: http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2009/01/31/george-obama.html

Saturday, January 31, 2009

The White House has declined to comment on reports that U.S. President Barack Obama's half-brother was arrested in Kenya after police allegedly found him in possession of one joint of marijuana.

George Hussein Onyango Obama, who is in his mid-20s, was arrested Friday near his home in Huruma, on the outskirts of Nairobi, said local police chief Joshua Omokulongolo.

"He is not a drug peddler," Omokulongolo told the Associated Press on Saturday. "But it's illegal, it's a banned substance."

Other media reports said he was picked up with three other young men and they were scheduled to appear in court Monday.

The youngest of Barack Obama Sr.'s seven children has only met his famous older brother twice — once when he was five and the last time in 2006 when Obama Jr. was on a tour of East Africa as an Illinois senator and visited Nairobi.

Obama Sr. died in a car crash in 1982.

A writer for the Italian edition of Vanity Fair visited George Obama last August and toured the shack he calls home. He told AP that reports of him earning $1 a day were exaggerated.

“I’m proud of how I live,” he told AP in an interview last summer, adding that the media “are tarnishing the family name.”