KEIR RADNEDGE in LAUSANNE:  Investigative journalist Anas Aremeyaw Anas directly blamed anger at his revelations about corruption in Ghanaian football for the murder of a colleague.

Anas, with his face covered for security reasons, was addressing the annual congress of AIPS, the international sports journalists’ association, at the Beau Rivage Hotel in Lausanne.

Safety first . . . Anas addresses AIPS Congress

Last week Ahmed Hussein-Suale, a member of Anas’s Tiger Eye investigation team, was shot twice fatally at close range while in his car near his home in Accra.

Hussein-Suale had previously received death threats for his contribution to a TV documentary which exposed bribery and corruption in African football.

Anas repeated the accusation linking the murder to  their exposure of football corruption in conceding that “all investigators face some level of danger” while outlining his methodology in not only sport but across all levels of African society.

Secret filming

A team of undercover reporters led by Anas posed as fans to secretly film meetings over two years in which they bribed officials, including Ghana FA president Kwesi Nyantakyi to fix matches.

Nyantakyi, who had also been a member of the governing council of world federation FIFA and frst vice-president of the African confederation. He resigned his posts and is now under investigation by both judicial and sporting authorities.

Also exposed was a World Cup assistant referee, Aden Range Marwa from Kenya. He had been due to work at last year’s final in Russia until he was caught on Anas’s camera taking a $600 cash payment.

Anas insisted that his methods were not entrapment because he obeyed generally accepted media standards in acting only against people for which prima facie evidence of corruption already existed.

He said: “I knew nothing about sport but when we looked at football we looked at numbers because when a story is big it has a lasting impression on people. We work on a story over a long period so we can achieve maximum resolve. We don’t just scratch the surface of a story, we go deeper.

“When you are dealing with extreme diseases you have to respond with extreme remedies. I belong to the remedies.”

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