THE British owner of a safari camp in Kenya was shot dead when he tried to help one of his security guards who had been taken hostage by robbers.

John Goldson, 69, was hit in the chest as he approached the gang in the car park of his upmarket tented camp on Tuesday night. One robber was also killed as he fled, but it is not known whether police or another robber shot him.

The gang then tried to hijack a car, killing the driver for refusing to stop and leaving his wife in a critical condition. They finally fled on foot with cash and mobile phones.

Mr Goldson went to Kenya in 1960 and ran the Crater Lake Lodge in Naivasha, a popular tourist region 55 miles northwest of the capital, Nairobi.

Simon Kiragu, the Naivasha district police chief, said that the case “looked like a murder” as nothing had been stolen from the lodge. Mr Goldson’s daughter Katie, 21, who lives in Britain, was flying to Kenya last night to be with the family.

He leaves two other children, Olivia, 15, and Hugh, 17, who are at boarding school in Nairobi, and two sons and a daughter from his first marriage. Mr Goldson, a doctor of agricultural economics, moved to Kenya under the auspices of the Overseas Development Agency. He then worked for the British High Commission as an agricultural adviser and for the agriculture department of the Kenyan Government.

His sister-in-law, Lynn Lury, 43, who set up the camp with her mother, Yvonne, in 1987, said: “We don’t know what they were trying to steal but it seems it all went wrong. They started shooting and he didn’t make it. Generally it’s a very peaceful area. Robbery is quite common but not to be killed.

“The only other person killed was one of the thieves. I think there were five of them. Then they ran because they’d just shot one of their own. John had just finished work and was going home to his lodge five minutes from the camp.”

She described Mr Goldson as an outgoing man and a good chef who enjoyed running the site and having people around. He and his wife took over the camp in 1999 from his mother-in-law. Mr Goldson continued to run it alone after his wife’s death. The lodge consists of 11 luxury tents set near a lake in an extinct volcano and is described as being “Kenya’s most romantic camp”.

Mr Goldson’s death is one of a string of attacks on black and white landowners in Naivasha. John Alma, a British farmer, was murdered at his farm last September, and a Dutch horticulturist was killed in March as he arrived home with workers’ salaries. A month later Tom Cholmondeley, heir to the fifth Baron Delamere, shot dead a Masai wildlife warden whom he mistook for a robber.

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