Evidence connecting Shrien Dewani to his wife’s 2010 murder is inconsistent, illogical and laughable, his lawyer has told the high court in Cape Town.
Francois van Zyl launched a blistering attack on the prosecution on Monday, saying the case against Dewani was so fundamentally flawed it should be thrown out of court.
He said prosecution’s case was so weak and implausible that the trial should cease immediately with no need for the Bristol businessman to mount a defence.
South Africa’s national prosecuting authority (NPA) accuses Dewani, 34, of masterminding his wife Anni’s murder in a township hijacking in Cape Town. Dewani denies any involvement in the killing.
Over the past seven weeks, the NPA lawyer Adrian Mopp has called evidence from 16 witnesses, including three South African men who admit to being part of the alleged assassination plot.
The prosecution witnesses testified not only about the events of 13 November 2010, but also about Dewani’s sex life, his allegedly tempestuous relationship with his wife and his allegedly suspicious actions before and after her murder.
Judge Jeanette Traverso, the second most senior judge in Cape Town, has already dismissed some of the prosecution’s evidence as irrelevant.
In his attempt to have the case dismissed from court, Dewani’s lawyer focused on the testimony of just one state witness: Zola Tongo, the taxi driver who claims Dewani commissioned him to carry out the murder.
Van Zyl told the court that Tongo was a “completely unreliable witness”. His testimony is “not only highly improbable, but it is also riddled with contradictions on virtually every material aspect”, he said.
Van Zyl said Tongo was the only one of the killers to have spoken directly to Dewani in advance of the murder.
As such, the lawyer said, he was the only witness who could testify to what he described as the NPA’s key allegation – that Dewani took part in a conspiracy to murder.
“The foundation of the state’s case is the conspiracy,” Van Zyl told the court. “If it collapses, the whole case goes with it.”
Dewani is applying for his trial to be halted under a law that permits a case to be dismissed early if the prosecution has shown “no evidence on which a reasonable court, acting carefully, might convict”.
Van Zyl acknowledged that this test involved a lower standard of proof than the “beyond reasonable doubt” required at what would be the trial’s natural end, but he argued that the “improbabilities” in the NPA’s case were so numerous and so significant that they merited airing now.
As a result, (MON) Monday’s hearing felt at times more like a defence summing up, as vVan Zyl attacked numerous aspects of the case against his client. Chief among the “many improbabilities” in the NPA’s story, he argued, was the idea that Tongo, would have agreed to take part in a murder having met Dewani for the first time at Cape Town airport.
“It is highly improbable that the accused, after he had been in Tongo’s company for approximately 30 minutes, would approach Tongo with a request to find someone to kill.
“It is even more improbable that Tongo, who had never been involved in any criminal activity, would virtually immediately agree.
“This sequence of events … is so highly improbable that it simply cannot be true, he said.
Van Zyl said Anni Dewani appeared to have been killed in a robbery or ransom plot gone wrong. “Yes, there was a conspiracy. Yes, there was a hijack. Yes, Anni was shot. But there is no evidence Shrien Dewani was involved,” he said.
Giving evidence earlier for the prosecution, the hijacker, Mziwamadoda Qwabe, and the so-called link man, Monde Mbolombo, both said they supported Tongo’s allegations against Dewani.
According to Van Zyl, however, their stories were impossible to reconcile.
The three men, all of whom gave evidence for the state under plea bargains from which they benefitted, differed over such fundamental aspects of the alleged conspiracy that their evidence was “an absolute mess”, he said.
“Their lies are so confused … [Mbolombo and Qwabe] were put in this room to support what Tongo had to say, but they did not support him at all.”
Qwabe was “a totally unreliable witness” and Mbolombo was “a blatant liar”, he said.
South African legal experts have expressed shock at the weakness of a murder allegation that a government lawyer had described as “very powerful” and the NPA chief said was “a fact” before Dewani’s extradition from Britain in April.
The prosecution is expected to put forward its argument for Dewani’s murder trial to continue on Tuesday. Traverso is expected to rule on the dismissal application later this week.
