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Botswana: State Strikes Wrong Note in Tshabalala Case
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Mmegi/The Reporter (Gaborone)
28 February 2008
Posted to the web 28 February 2008
Bame Piet
The case in which South African Kwaito star, Tokollo Tshabalala, is facing two counts of culpable homicide started on a sour note for the state yesterday.
Tshabalala is accused of driving the BMW that collided with a Ford Leisure, killing Maria Monyatsi and her friend, Tumelo Monaisa, on the morning of March 17 2001.
The first to take the witness box was, Kebonye Tsiaka, a combi driver who saw the accident.
He told the court that he had just got on the road when an overspeeding silver BMW slightly hit his car and subsequently colliding head-on with an on-coming red Ford Leisure.
He said that the accident occurred just 10-15 metres from the Willie Seboni-Ledumadumane junction. He was driving westward: "I just saw this BMW in my mirror and heard a bang as the two vehicles collided".
He stopped a few metres from the scene and could see that the driver of the van had died since she was not moving.
He added that two other passengers in the BMW looked seriously injured while two others were thrown out of the car when they collided.
Tshabalala had brought a team of three lawyers comprising Advocate Billy Gendelfinger, Covin Garvey and Benjamin Van der Berg. Garvey put it to Tsiaka that he had not checked both sides of the road before joining. He said he did.
Garvey enquired from Tsiaka if there was enough space between him and the oncoming two cars before he joined the road and he insisted that there was no car coming from the east before he joined.
After another question was posed to him on whether he was sure he checked, the combi driver collapsed, prompting a short adjournment. The witness told the court that he did not notice the occupants of the BMW.
An investigating officer, sergeant Moses Serumola said that he spotted the BMW that had no number plates and he followed it trying to stop the driver.
After a chase, the BMW stopped. The BMW then sped away at high speed heading north towards Block 6 mall.
He said he noticed Bissau as a passenger and that he phoned surrounding police stations about the car.
"After 30 or 40 minutes, while driving towards our police station, I came across an accident and noticed that one of the cars was the BMW I had seen earlier. The driver was still the same guy," he told the court.
He said that two unconscious occupants of the BMW were taken to Princess Marina Hospital and only learned from the nurses that the driver was Tokollo Tshabalala. The sketch of the accident scene was produced in court but it only illustrated that two vehicles were involved in the accident. Garvey wanted him to state whether he was sure that Tokollo was the driver when the accident occurred. He answered in the affirmative saying that he found him in the driver's seat.
Garvey accused him of trying to fabricate the story since he had not said that in his written statement and that he had said nothing about Bissau Gaobakwe being in the passenger seat.
He further accused him of trying to exonerate Gaobakwe and dismissed him as an unreliable witness. The police, court papers say, did not find Bissau at the scene of the accident.
The presiding Chief Magistrate, Lot Moroka was not happy either. He accused Serumola of doing a shoddy job.
He wondered why he overlooked the role played by the combi driver to the extent that his vehicle was not in the sketch.
His combi was not taken for testing, and worse, he had omitted that Bissau, the owner of the car, was a passenger in the front seat.
In his brief testimony, Kenneth Dibotelo, one of the passengers, told the court that after spending the previous night drinking "quite a few" beers, he only remembers that Tokollo was driving the BMW when they left the House of Blues Club in Mogoditshane at around 5:30am.
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He passed out at Mogoditshane circle and only woke up in hospital. The fifth passenger in the car was Geoffry Pilane. Gaobakwe takes the witness box today.
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| Copyright © 2008 Mmegi/The Reporter. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections -- or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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