BBCThe sister of a 16-year-old boy who drowned while swimming naked at a Christian holiday camp in Zimbabwe run by child abuser John Smyth blames the Church of England for his death.”The Church knew about the abuses that John Smyth was doing. They should have stopped him. Had they stopped him, I think my brother [Guide Nyachuru] would still be alive,” Edith Nyachuru told the BBC.The British barrister had moved to Zimbabwe with his wife and four children from Winchester in England in 1984 to work with an evangelistic organisation.This was two years after an investigation revealed he had subjected boys in the UK, many of whom he had met at Christian holiday camps run by a charity he chaired that was linked to the Church, to traumatic physical, psychological and sexual abuse.The 1982 report, prepared by Anglican clergyman Mark Ruston, about the canings said “the scale and severity of the practice was horrific”, with accounts of boys beaten so badly they bled, with one describing how he needed to wear nappies until his wounds scabbed over.Despite these shocking revelations, mainly involving boys from elite British public schools, the Rushton report was not widely circulated.A decade on, aged 50, Smyth had established himself as a respected member of the Christian community in Zimbabwe. He had set up his own organisation, Zambesi Ministries, with funding from the UK – and was meting out similar punishments at camps that he marketed at the country’s top schools.Ms Nyachuru says her brother’s trip had been an early Christmas present from one of his other sisters, who had picked up one of Smyth’s brochures and been impressed with all the activities on offer for the week.As she looks at an old photograph of Guide, she says he was the youngest of eight siblings, and the only boy: “He was very loved by everyone.”A lovely boy… Guide was due to be made head boy the following year,” she remembers, adding that he was “an intelligent boy, a good swimmer, strong, healthy with no known medical conditions”.But within 12 hours of him being dropped at the camp at Ruzawi School in Marondera, 74km (46 miles) from the capital, Harare, on the evening of 15 December 1992, the family received a call to say he had died.Witnesses say that like all the boys, Guide had gone swimming naked in a pool before bed – a camp tradition. The other boys returned to the dormitory, but Guide’s absence was not noticed – which his sister finds surprising – and his body was found at the bottom of the pool the next morning. His family rushed to the mortuary but Ms Nyachuru’s shock was compounded by confusion when she was stopped by officers from viewing his body: “They told me: ‘You can’t go in there because …
