Following the new developments in the ICC case, where an arrest warrant has been issued against journalist Walter Barasa. We would like to resend the statement that he had released to the media last week over the impending arrest warrant. I believe the statement will be of help as he has been advised by his lawyers not to make any further statement in the meantime.
Thanks
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.
About the Author
The first question that I would like to ask Barasa is this: why did these people approach him to commit a crime and not thousands of Kenya journalists or any of the 40 million Kenyans. The second question: Did he report the matter to the police and if so did they open a case file and if they did what did they do about? Question 3; Why has he decided to go public with this statement now and not during the time he was in contact with these people or immediately after? I am not a lawyer but I would ask you to save this for the court that is where you will need to prove your innocence. Not in the public domain. It would be a shame and betrayal if you sold your family and profession for six pieces of silver so as to deny victims of horrendous crime justice
If you read the whole hogwash story from the nut himself .You just smell a rat or grilled Mongoose that smachs rotten. you just find such stories only in a movie ,played nby his hirelings none other than the gass-chamber planner and executioner .hence the story is cooked and coached!Just lock the bastard and he will yap and yap.these are nairobi aka city conment playing high hence living in an evil corrupt environment of thie huge East African bloody City.
Why is This Corrup Kenyas Deputy President think that he can play with the ICC intelligence by buying and coaching stupid and primitive Money-loving greedy journalists .Please Mr Ruto stop playing with western intelligence , They Make Laws, They fought farcism in Europe they deal a huge blow to Nazi war criminals and their leaders. thanks mr William Ruto they have under their Wings!
Wednesday, February 1, 2012
Kenya and the Network
The recent ICC decisions regarding Kenya (confirming charges against four out of six defendants) highlight the centrality and significance of collective criminal action.
In particular, what’s striking about the decisions is the specific organizations that the Pre-Trial Chamber concentrated on, and the recurring legal significance that the court attached to these organizations.
For example, Prosecutor v. Muthaura, Kenyatta, and Hussein Ali, concentrates on the Mungiki organization, and that organization anchors the court’s analysis of the substantive offense as well as the mode of liability in the case. Here’s how the court does it:
First, the PTC found that the Mungiki was an organization within the meaning of the Rome Statute’s definition of crimes against humanity, which requires that the attack be widespread and systematic and pursuant to a state or organizational plan or policy. There is a longstanding academic and judicial dispute over the meaning of “organizational” in this context, and a few scholars and judges have concluded that state involvement is required here. Included in this group are Bill Schabas and the dissenting judge in this case, Judge Kaul. I think it is fair to say that the majority view (whether correct or not) is that at least some non-governmental organizations (or sub-state organizations) might qualify under this standard, though whether the Mungiki organization meets the criteria is a more specific inquiry.
What interests me is that the exact same analysis appears in the section on modes of liability, when the PTC finds that the defendants (whose charges were confirmed) are potentially indirect co-perpetrators because they controlled an organized apparatus of power – the Mungiki – whose members carried out the attacks.
There is some tension, though, between the picture of the Mungiki painted in the crimes against humanity section of the opinion and the section on indirect co-perpetration. For example, when discussing the organizational plan or policy, the PTC concludes that a third individual not charged in the case, Maina Njenga, “possessed exclusive control over the Mungiki organization.” However, when the PTC discusses indirect co-perpetration, the PTC concludes that the confirmed defendants had joint control over it. How is this possible? According to the court, the control was “transferred” from Njenga to the confirmed defendants. But did both of the confirmed defendants have control or just one of them? Did the physical perpetrators really report to both of them? I suspect this will be an issue at trial.
The second case, Prosecutor v. Ruto, Kosgey, and Sang, does not deal with the Mungiki. Having no such organization to anchor its analysis of crimes against humanity, the PTC concludes that there was a “Network” of perpetrators who constituted an organization with a plan or policy to carry out the attacks. This Network sounds rather ad hoc, closer to a conspiracy or a Joint Criminal Enterprise than a state-based organization of the kind that Schabas favors or even the kind of identifiable organization like the Mungiki. It is, I suspect, an importation of the collective concepts one finds on the mode of liability side of the analysis – a JCE or an organized apparatus of power. But I question whether the type of ad hoc collective one finds on the mode of liability side is the same type of collective appropriate for the “plan or policy” requirement.
Obviously, this importation is going to be hotly debated. On the one hand, I’m not sure that an organization needs to have a formal name in order to meet the crimes against humanity standard – that would be far too formalistic. On the other hand, though, if a “network” of perpetrators is allowed to constitute an organization for purposes of crimes against humanity, it will clearly represent a significant expansion of the concept from its origins in the Nuremberg era.
Posted by Jens David Ohlin at 12:42 PM
COUNT 1
Corruptly influencing a witness – Article 70(l)(c) read with Article 25(3)(a) Walter Osapiri BARASA is criminally responsible under Article 25(3)(a), as direct perpetrator, for the crime of corruptly influencing a witness, (P-0336), by offering to pay him between one million and one and a half million Kenyan Shillings (KES 1,000,000 – 1,500,000) in order to influence him to withdraw as a Prosecution witness, committed during the period 20 May to 21 July 2013 and at or near Kampala, Uganda.
COUNT 2
Corruptly influencing a witness – Article 70(l)(c) read with Article 25(3)(a) Walter Osapiri BARASA is criminally responsible under Article 25(3)(a), as direct perpetrator, for the crime of corruptly influencing a witness, (P-0536), by offering to pay her and her husband a total of one million four hundred thousand Kenyan Shillings (KES 1,400,000) in order to influence her to withdraw as a Prosecution witness, committed during the period 20 May to 25 July 2013 and at or near Kampala, Uganda.
COUNT 3
Attempting to corruptly influence a witness – Article 70(l)(c) read with Article 25(3)(f) Walter Osapiri BARASA is criminally responsible under Article 25(3)(f), for the crime of attempting to corruptly influence a witness, (P-0256), by inducing her to meet with (P-0336) for the purpose of offering her a bribe in an attempt to influence her to withdraw as a Prosecution witness, and/or by corruptly inducing (P-0336) to influence to withdraw as a witness, committed during the period 21 to 22 July 2013 and at or near Kampala, Uganda.
http://www.icc-cpi.int/en_menus/icc/press%20and%20media/press%20releases/Documents/pr948/ICC-0109-0113-1-Red2-Reclass.pdf
http://www.kenyalaw.org/Downloads/Acts/The_International_Crimes_Act_2008.pdf
If Kenya Government is not going to hand-over Baraza to the ICC the alterative is to detain Ruto untill Uhuru Goverment smells the coffee! I am all for the Hague statute because our political leaders have domestically shown total disregard for the law, they literally owns the police force and the judiciary and hence to get justice, that may mean going to the other only place where personal jurisdiction will be available. Eliminate the ICC and our politician becomes our gods.
For those used to buying of the police and the judges in order to obtain the popular “lack of enough evidence” rulings, surprise, surprise. Lack of enough evidence has been used so many times in the Kenyan judicial system that its synonemous with “he has enough money.”
At the icc no kitu-kidogo you dont threaten judges or
witnes Kenyans are used to corruption.Mtado
Detain Ruto and things will change .break the man by locking him in cells
Sihofu kusema nachukia hili zimwi liitwalo icc.naam zimwi. Mara ngapi tumesikia uvumi icc kuhonga mashahidi? Hadi sasa wameonga mashahidi wangapi? Nani atashtaki icc kwa uvumi wa hongo? Nilidhani icc ni mahakama ya jinai na maasi makuu. Ebo, kumbe ni mahakama ya umbea uvumi
udaku
Sihofu kusema nachukia hili zimwi liitwalo icc.naam zimwi. Mara ngapi tumesikia uvumi icc kuhonga mashahidi? Hadi sasa wameonga mashahidi wangapi? Nani atashtaki icc kwa uvumi wa hongo? Nilidhani icc ni mahakama ya jinai na maasi makuu. Ebo, kumbe ni mahakama ya umbea uvumi udaku au dhana tupu,kesi ambazo husuluishwa na wazee mtaa. Eti baraza alitaka kuhonga mashahidi kuzuia haki. Upuzi! Icc inachewelesha kwa kutafuta vijimambo ebuka. Miaka sita sasa hawaoni dhuluma kwani wao wanashiba hela za vikao. Wao wangekuwa watafiti wengi tungekufa na dhuluma kwani wanategemea uvumi unaopaliliwa na marekani na wingereza
udaku
UHURU KENYATTA & his Cousin Attorney general GITHU MUIGAI must stop dragging their feet but must surrender Journalist Baraza to the ICC in Hague Both the Office of the President & Attorney must cooperate with the ICC (washeni Ulaghai na Ufisadi)
Baboons and Chimpanaees will be meeting in Adis-ababa Ethiopian Capital to Discuss Uhuru Kenyatta & William Ruto> The first thing to notice is the questionable african Dictators 8murderers,rapists, arsonists eg. Eritrean President ,Museveni, Kagame .Ethiopian mad-man etc >The Icc should not surrender to barbarians ,savages ,Primitives from the dark evil continent that has rejected civilization,democracy and freedom to grant their own oppressed masses of Africa .They, mass-kill,poison, rape skin,torture burn their own. these dirty &evil dictators should be forced to civiliaze!When will Isaiah Arfewerki release Mr ISAK who has been in detention over 11 years without taking him to court.
The western democracy should ignore these mad-men from the dark uncivilized savage &barbarian continent ruled by Sub-humans!
Ruto The Deputy Of Uhuru Kenyatta (Mass-Murderer should stop Playing with the ICC intelligence and stop their nonsense of cheating Kenyans that the ICC does not have its Police-force< what a fool?Every member or even none member countries including NATO has the right to arrest any wanted criminal that the ICC OTP has issued a warrant of arrest. Githu Muigai the Kenya attorney general should his hogwash &impunity .but must arrest Baraza and put him in the next flight to Hague !
http://nipate.com/it-s-game-over-for-walter-barasa-chief-justice-to-appoint-judge-to-process-arrest-warrant-t32713.html
I feel barasa has some questionst to answer.if he has the truth,why is he afraid? Tell im Ali and Kosgey were there,co-operated and are back in kenya.his fear is half an answer.we can read.
Supplementary Affidavit – Kimeli.doc
Published by Oliver Mathenge Wambugu
A former ICC prosecution witness asking the High Court not to allow for the arrest of Walter Barasa since he cannot get a fair trial at The Hague.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/179605007/Supplementary-Affidavit-Kimeli-doc