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Barack Obama's Kenyan half-brother, George, has been arrested by police in Nairobi on suspicion of possessing marijuana.
The 24-year-old, who denies the allegation, was told he would face a court hearing on Monday.
President Obama's young half-sibling was in the headlines last year after it was revealed that he was living in a corrugated iron shack in a sprawling slum as his brother ran for the most powerful job in the world.
George, who was the son of Mr Obama's father by his second wife, was one of the president's few close relatives who did not travel to Washington for the inauguration on Jan 20.
The two met previously when Mr Obama visited his ancestral homeland in an encounter that he described as a "painful affair" in his memoir Dreams from My Father.
Inspector Augustine Mutembei said the trainee mechanic would face charges of possession of cannabis and resisting arrest.
But the accused man protested his innocence in comments from behind bars. "They took me from my home," he told a CNN reporter after alerting the local correspondent with a telephone call. "I don't know why they are charging me."
He was later released from custody, according to a relative. It was not immediately clear whether his scheduled court appearance on Monday would go ahead.
Barack Obama Sr met the president's mother while they were both college students in Hawaii. The couple later divorced and he moved back to Kenya where he remarried.
George, his youngest child, was just six months old when his father died in a car crash and lives with his mother's relatives in the Nairobi slum of Huruma.
Despite his humble background, he was angered by magazine reports last year that he was living in poverty on less than a dollar a day.
"I was brought up well," he said in a subsequent interview. "I live well even now. I think I kind of like it here. There are some challenges, but maybe it is just like where you come from, there are the same challenges."
George Obama is not the first member of the president's extended African family to make the news. Last year, it was reported that his paternal aunt Zeituni Onyango was an illegal immigrant to the US living in a rundown public housing estate in South Boston.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/barackobama/4412046/Barack-Obamas-half-brother-George-arrested-in-Kenya-on-drug-charges.html
