STATEMENT BY WALTER
BARASA:
My full names are Walter
Barasa. I
am a journalist. I joined the
journalism profession in
1985 after
finishing my diploma
course.
I have
worked as a journalist for
18 years
most of it with the Nation
newspaper
and then the People daily.
Between 1st and 5th
December 2012
I was called by somebody
who
introduced himself to me
as an
International Criminal
Court (ICC)
investigator.
He introduced
himself as
Paul Irani. He informed me
that he
had been given my name
and phone
number by somebody who
was known
to me.
He further informed me
that he was
an ICC investigator and
wanted to
meet him in Nairobi. He
told me to
hire a taxi from Eldoret to
Nairobi
and that he would pay for
the taxi
once I arrived in Nairobi
because the
matter he wanted us to
discuss was
urgent.
He paid Ksh 30,000
to the
taxi owner upon arrival in
Nairobi.
We met at the Westgate
Mall in
Westlands. He was with
another
investigator called Ule. I
introduced
myself. He told me that he
wanted
me to help them in
connection with a
lady in Kiambaa and that
she was a
witness in a case which
was earlier
conducted in Nakuru.
He
told me I
was a good man and that I
should
get the lady to confirm
what she had
told him on phone because
he could
not travel to Eldoret which
he was
told was hostile.
He bought a cellphone for
me with
an Airtel line to take to the
lady.
I
went and met the lady
who confirmed
that she had talked with
Paul Irani. I
later confirmed to Irani
that I had
met the lady. He requested
me to get
the lady a temporary
passport to
enable her go to Uganda
for
interrogation and
statement
recording.
When the lady came back
she told
me that she had been a
worker at a
certain politicians home
and that the
investigators had told her
to say that
she was a cook and that
she seen
planning meetings being
held at the
politicians home and had
cooked for
youths and served them
with food as
they planned to attack the
Kiambaa
church.
I asked her whether that
was actually
true but she told me that it
was not
true because during the
time she was
employed by the politician
she was
actually working as a
casual labourer
planting tree seedlings and
sometimes used to harvest
maize.
She also told me that she
had left
that employment five
years before
but that she had been
forced to say
that she was cooking and
serving food
during the period the
violence
occurred. I encouraged her
to confirm
to whether she was ready
to defend
that position. I asked her
how as a
Kikuyu she could be
allowed to get
into a planning meeting
and cook
and serve food to people
who were
going to kill her relatives.
She told
me that she had been told
to say
that so that the case would
be
strong.
I warned her that she faced
the risk
of prosecution if it turned
out that
she was lying. We ended
our
conversation and she told
me that
Paul had sent her to tell
me to get
her a passport. The
investigators sent
her a total of Ksh 45,500
and a sum
of Ksh 6,000 for facilitation
making a
total of Ksh 51,500 which
the lady
(536) withdrew and gave
me.
We got the passports and
she and
her family crossed over to
Uganda.
We cut off communication
for some
time until I received a call
from the
lady using a Ugandan
number. She
told me that her children
were not
going to school and that
life had
become very difficult
contrary to what
she was promised and her
husband
was very bitter and
wanted them to
come back to the country.
She told me she did not
want to
continue with the case and
wanted to
come back. I later met Paul
Irani at
Topelli restaurant near
Nairobi
hospital and informed him
about the
ladies complaints and
warned him
that the lady had
threatened to
abandon the cause. He
promised to
address the issue. The lady
stopped
calling me for some time
until a time
when she called me on a
Burundian
number.
That is when I
learnt that
she had been moved to
Burundi. She
was still complaining of
poor
treatment. She insisted
that since I
was the one she knew I
should assist
her get out of Burundi
because she
did not have money to get
her back
in the country.
Communication between
us went off
again and then a week
later she
called me from a phone
whose code
was +423 which is the
code for DR
Congo with the same
complaint.
She
repeated the same thing
that she
was fed up and wanted me
to assist
her and her family back. I
told her I
did not have money but if I
get
money I could assist her
but in the
event that I could not
manage she
had a right to protest,
disclose the
truth and ask whoever was
in charge
to return her into the
country.
The calls were so many but
when I
refused to pick she wrote
me
numerous text messages
which I wish
to give you where she was
stating the
same thing. I wish to read
you some
of the messages. During
the course of
my acquaintance with Paul
Irani I
started developing great
doubts on
the competence of the
Office of the
Prosecutors (OTP)
investigations.
I
met the investigators
severally at
various meetings and
raised some of
these issues:-
i) At one meeting I
challenged Paul
and one Silvano from
Burkina Faso if
they would be able to
succeed in
establishing the truth
when they
were carrying out armchair
investigations in a hotel on
the basis
of information from people
who were
known gold diggers
roaming the
streets of Eldoret after he
showed me
a list of the names he had
lined up
as his sources of
information and
investigation.
ii) I also reminded him that
witness
536 had confided in me
she was not
in the employment of the
politician
she was alleging she was
working for
at the time and she had
not been a
cook. I told him that the
same case
had been dismissed by the
court in
Nakuru. He dismissed my
concerns
and told me to leave him
alone.
He tried sending me to find
other
individuals whose names
he gave me.
I contacted some of them. I
met
some of them but I told
him that
those people were
unreliable.
He flew back sometime in
February or
March this year then on
13th
September this year he
contacted me
on phone and via email
asking me to
meet him urgently because
my life
was in danger and he
wanted me to
leave the country
immediately.
He
suggested that he meets
me at The
Hague, Uganda or Nairobi
as the last
option. I agreed to go to
Nairobi on
15th September 2013 for
the
meeting. The email he
wrote to me is
attached and I wish to read
parts of
it. I met him with another
white man
at Topelli restaurant.
I
expected a
cordial meeting but when I
arrived at
the meeting Paul Irani
ordered me to
dismantle all my phones. I
accepted
to do so after quarrelling
for over 10
minutes.
Immediately he told me
that he had
two options for me:-
i) He told me that he knew
that I had
been working with the
Deputy
President to coerce and
compromise
witnesses and that I should
cooperate with him and
the
prosecution and accept to
implicate
the Deputy President after
which we
would fly out of the
country with him
that night because my life
was in
danger.
ii) Alternatively he was
going to
engineer and have a
warrant of arrest
be issued against me and
that I
could be jailed for five
years. But
that as a friend he did not
want to
be jailed and that the best
option
was for me to implicate the
Deputy
President.
I was greatly infuriated by
these
suggestions. I told him that
I did not
remember the last time I
met William
Ruto and I told him if I ever
met and
spoke with Ruto it was
way back in
2007 but from then and up
to the
time I was meeting him I
had not
met him but he retorted
that I had
met him after he came
from Japan.
I
told him that those were
lies, I could
not accept those lies and
that he
should go ahead and cause
the
warrants to be issued. I
told him that
I was ready to stand in any
court to
refute those lies.
He told me that I was
becoming
difficult and he was going
to arrest
me right away.
I told him
to dare
arrest me. I rose from my
chair
picked my bag and went to
the
washrooms but when I
came out the
two called me back. I was
extremely
fearful and in order to get
away from
them, I told them that I
would get
back to them. They gave
me Ksh
7,200 for accommodation
and
transport. They suggested
that after I
had considered he options
I should
escape with them to
Uganda. I never
contacted them again.
I have now heard rumours,
which the
prosecution should confirm
or deny
that a warrant of arrest has
been
issued against me over an
alleged
interference/ prevention of
witness
number 536 from
attending court.
Am ready and prepared to
defend
myself against these
allegations,
which are false. I have
special
knowledge of all the
investigators
machinations relating to
the
recruitment of this witness
536 and
others and I will not be
blackmailed
to tell lies.
I am aware of
the
activities of the
investigators and
what they are doing now
and have
done in the past.
I respect the court, I
respect the
rights of the accused
persons to a fair
hearing, and the victims
right to get
justice but I do not accept
coercion
and unorthodox means of
implicating
accused persons and
conducting
investigations to attain an
unjust
end.
I wish to inform you that
the
conversation of 15th
September 2013
was recorded by Irani and I
challenge
him to produce the entire
unedited
clip to the court and all
concerned. I
also recorded parts of the
proceedings which I am
ready to
produce to prove what I
am saying.
I have already instructed
my advocate
Mr Nick Kaufmann to
appear for me
and bring the above
matters to the
attention of the court.
I
attach here
to a letter from my
advocate.
Thank you.
Yours faithfully
Walter Barasa
This comes after ICC issued a warrant of arrest and handed to the Kenyan government to arrest and hand him over to them.
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