SANTO DOMINGO. – On the night of August 3, 2008, in a farm in Baní (south) property of Luis Lara, several defendants in the Paya, Bani multiple murder case talked about “a job” which finally “fell through,” according to the witness Robert Peña Valdez, who also understood that there was something illicit being plotted.

Peña Valdez, brother of the defendant Miguel Figueroa Peña, said he went to the farm in the company of the latter, who told him when he came out that “the job had fallen through.”

The witness, the first to testify for the prosecution, after being cross-examined by some defense lawyers affirmed however that he didn’t see anything illicit or compromising during the gathering.

In his testimony Peña Valdez implicates Eduard Mayovanex Rodríguez Montero, Jorge Luis Chalas, Janeurys Calvo Tejada, Luis Lara Martínez, Ricardo Guzmán Pérez, Antonio Manuel Rocha, Andrés Tapia Balbuena, Dennys Jairo Rodríguez, Quilvio Santana Féliz and José Simé Cisnero (lawyer).

He said he met them, except the lawyer, in the meeting in Lara’s farm, who went to speak alone with the lawyer and left alone in the company of the current defendant Jesus Sanchez Piña.

The witness said that when his brother left him alone he told him nothing else except that he should stay in the house and that nothing was going to happen to him.

When cross-examined by Freddy Castillo, Sanchez Piña’s lawyer, the witness said that while both waited outside, this one never spoke to him of any illicit plot.

In some cross-examinations the witness wavered on whether he knew the defendant Luis Lara, and whether on the night of the celebration in the farm “where he was going to party with some girls” he had used alcohol, version which doesn’t coincide with the statement in the previously introduced evidence.

The witness, who was a lieutenant commander in the Navy, was stripped of his commission , according to his Court testimony, for his connection with the case, in which seven Colombians were gunned down execution style in the village Ojo de Agua, near Paya.