September 25, 1995. Copyright, 1995, Graphic News. All rights reserved

SCOTLAND YARD OPEN NEW PROBE INTO JULIE WARD MURDER
By Duncan Mil

LONDON, September 25, Graphic News - British police have launched a new probe into the 1988 death of a British tourist in a Kenyan game park after being given harrowing new evidence by an eyewitness who is now in hiding in a Scandinavian country.
The eyewitness, Valentine Kodipo, was first interviewed by John Ward, father of British tourist Julie Ward at the home of a Kenyan MP in 1993. There he heard how a policeman Ð said to be a self-confessed member of an alleged Kenyan government death squad Ð executed Miss Ward with a carved wooden tribal club. topped off with the wheel nut of a tractor.
   According to a tape-recorded statement, the killer, under orders from a senior politician who was watching, hit Miss Ward at the base of the skull after she had suffered prolonged torture. The killing took place in a remote area of KenyaÕs Masai Mara game reserve in the western part of the country on a September evening in 1988.
Julie Ward, a 28-year-old from Suffolk, disappeared while spending a weekend photographing wildlife on the Masai Mara game reserve. Her father flew to Kenya to search for her but found only the charred remains of her body far out in the bush near the Kenyan-Tanzanian border.
The Kenyan authorities claimed that she had been eaten by wild animals after losing her way in the bush but Ward was certain that she had been murdered.
He claimed that Kenyan police tried to conceal the cause of JulieÕs death by altering the original autopsy, forging her signature in a game reserve register and hiding evidence.
The strongest forensic evidence includes strands of JulieÕs hair and the battery from her Olympus camera found at the  game post.

Source: UK News, The Animals Are Innocent: The Search For JulieÕs Killers by John Ward, published by Headline.