The South African man found guilty of shooting Anni Dewani dead was convicted on partially false evidence, a key prosecution witness to Shrien Dewani’s murder trial has said.
Testifying on Thursday for the prosecution against the murder-accused Briton, Monde Mbolombo admitted that he had lied in the previous trial in 2012 at which gangster Xolile Mngeni was convicted of Anni Dewani’s murder.
“You lied in the State v Mngeni?”, Dewani’s prosecutor, Shareen Riley, asked the 34-year-old hotel receptionist. “That’s correct,” Mbolombo replied.
Mbolombo, who admits being the “middle man” in the alleged plot to murder Anni Dewani, was one of the main witnesses to testify for South Africa’s national prosecuting authority (NPA) during the 2012 murder trial of Xolile Mngeni.
Mbolombo’s claim that he put the Dewanis’ taxi driver, Zola Tongo, in touch with two township “hitmen” formed part of the matrix of evidence that led to Mngeni being convicted of Anni’s murder and sentenced to life in prison.
While Mngeni, who contracted brain cancer shortly after Anni’s November 2010 murder, has since died in prison, Mbolombo has ever since remained a free man.
Shrien Dewani’s murder trial on Thursday heard how, as part of his immunity deal with the NPA, Mbolombo made three confession or witness statements.
In the third statement – two weeks before Shrien Dewani’s trial began – he included information he had initially omitted about his involvement in the kidnap plot after CCTV footage emerged that contradicted part of his earlier story.
The footage appeared to show him playing a much more significant role in Anni Dewani’s kidnap plot than he had previously admitted.
“When we looked at the footage, everything can be seen”, Mbolombo said in court. “[I realised] there’s nothing I could hide. I had to tell the truth”.
On Thursday, Mbolombo insisted – just as he had at Mngeni’s 2012 trial – that his friend Zola Tongo telephoned him a day before Anni’s murder and told him that “the husband wants the wife to be killed”. While this claim forms a key element of the case against Dewani, the Briton’s defence team is likely to seize on Mbolombo’s admission that he previously lied under oath as evidence of his unreliability.
Potentially more damaging to the NPA, however, is the prospect that the false evidence Mbolombo now admits giving to Mngeni’s 2012 murder trial may have resulted in a wrongful conviction.
Shrien Dewani’s trial judge, Jeanette Traverso, appeared to acknowledge the seriousness of Mbolombo’s admission when she warned him that his immunity deal could yet be rescinded.
“I have to warn you”, Traverso told Monde Mbolombo. “You will only be granted indemnity if you testify honestly in this [trial]. I am not satisfied that the indemnity granted to you in the trial of Mngeni applies here.”
Anni Dewani was shot once in the neck when the taxi she and her husband Shrien Dewani were travelling in was hijacked as it passed through Cape Town’s Gugulethu township during the couple’s Cape Town honeymoon.
Three South African men, including Tongo and Mbolombo, have admitted being involved in the 13 November 2010 plot. All three have cut plea bargain or immunity deals with the NPA by which they have benefited in return for their witness evidence.
Shrien Dewani denies all involvement in his wife’s murder. The case continues.
