A WOMAN broke down at the Central Criminal Court yesterday as she recalled seeing two men drag her boyfriend from his car and kick him to death.
The couple had gone to watch aircraft land and take off near Dublin airport.
Jelena Sirokova, from Estonia, was giving evidence on day one of the trial of Dublin man Ian Daly (28), who is accused of murdering Valeri Ranert.
Mr Daly, Moatview Drive, Priorswood, has pleaded not guilty to murdering Mr Ranert, from Estonia, on or about April 30th, 2007, at Naul Road in Swords. He also denies hijacking his Volkswagen Golf car.
Through an interpreter, Ms Sirokova told Michael Durack SC, prosecuting, that on April 29th, she had gone with Mr Ranert, her boyfriend of two years, to the viewing ground at the back of Dublin airport, and parked facing the runway.
They were there about an hour when a young man knocked on the window of the passenger seat where Mr Ranert was sitting. He rolled down the window and the stranger asked for a light, she said. Mr Ranert said he was sorry, he didn’t smoke, and he closed the window.
Ms Sirokova said the man knocked again and Mr Ranert rolled down the window and repeated that he did not smoke and did not have a light.
“The young man started screaming and asking Valeri to give him his phone,” she recalled, and he also tried to kick her boyfriend through the open window.
She then jumped into the back seat and her boyfriend jumped into the driver seat. “Valeri wanted to give him his phone,” she added.
She said Mr Ranert asked her to phone the Garda but she didn’t know the number.
“He started the car. The people around the car started breaking the windows in,” she said, recalling that there were at least two people as the windows were being broken from both sides.
“The young man was trying to open the door and Valeri was trying to close the door,” she said. “The young man from the passenger side went around to the driver side and the two of them managed to open the door and one of them kicked Valeri in the face.”
She cried as she said that Mr Ranert was unconscious from this kick, but that the two men pulled him out of the car to the ground some distance away and started kicking him. She broke down as she tried but failed to remember which part of her boyfriend’s body was being kicked and the court rose for a few minutes to allow her to take a break.
Ms Sirokova said she managed to get out of the car and started running through long grass, but she came to a fence and had to turn back. She fell to the ground and covered her face. “I didn’t want to see anything,” she said.
When the attackers took off in their car and Mr Ranert’s car, she ran to him lying on the road.
“I started shaking him and shouting Valeri, Valeri, Valeri,” she recalled. “He wasn’t responding. He was unconscious.”
Ms Sirokova eventually got help from a man near by. John Rothwell, who called the emergency services, later told the court that she was frantic when she knocked on his vehicle’s window asking for help.
Ms Sirokova said a phone on the ground beside Mr Ranert then began ringing and she answered it, thinking it was his. The person on the other end spoke in English and she passed the phone on to a member of the airport police.
Opening the case to the jury, Mr Durack said that a mobile phone registered to Ian Daly was found at the scene and that it was his case that Mr Daly was one of the men who kicked Mr Ranert to death.
The trial, which is expected to last six days, continues before Mr Justice George Birmingham and a jury.