Valentine’s bail application postponed – again
The investigating officer fears that if Valentine is granted bail and skips, police would struggle to track him down because technically he does not exist.
The Krugersdorp Magistrates’ Court has once again decided to postpone Zak Valentines‘ bail hearing.
Magistrate Keith Page postponed the hearing to 2 November in order for him to make a ruling. Valentine is accused of faking his own death and of murder.
The investigating officer made a representation stating the reasons why the court should not grant Valentine bail. Valentine also presented an affidavit.
The Magistrate now needs to work through these documents to make a decision.
In Valentine’s affidavit, he claimed that someone in a vehicle with blue lights pulled him over and sprayed him with pepper spray. He claims he ran away from these alleged perpetrators and went into hiding because he feared for his life. He further states that he received phone calls from the perpetrators. They allegedly threatened him and said they were going to kill his parents in the same way his wife was killed if he ever went to the police. He said he could not identify the perpetrators, which is why he hid from the police.
He states that he later heard he’d been declared dead, but he could not come out of hiding because he feared for his parents’ lives.
Valentine claimed he was now willing to give the information in his affidavit to the court because he had been arrested and it is now known that he is alive. He claimed he lived 250 metres from the perpetrators who threatened him and now that he is not close to them anymore, he is willing to speak out.
Valentine’s affidavit mentions here and there that he believed the perpetrators were the Steyn family, but in most of his statements he would only use pronouns, saying things such as ‘she threatened me’.
The Steyns – Marinda, Marcel and Leroux – are currently standing accused of murdering three Krugersdorpers during May this year, and the two cases have been centralised, which means there is a suspect common to all the cases.
The investigating officer fears that if Valentine is granted bail, and skips, the police would struggle to track him down because technically he doesn’t exist, having been declared dead. He also cannot be blacklisted because he is ostensibly dead.
Furthermore, Valentine claimed that he did not know the identity document he was carrying was falsified. He mentioned that Leroux Steyn had falsified the ID, but he himself did not check to see if it was false. The ID document showed a photo of Valentine, but the surname in it was De Villiers. Valentine also introduced himself as De Villiers during the six months that he was presumed dead.
The Magistrate will consider the new information given to him and a ruling will possibly be made on 2 November at the Krugersdorp Magistrates’ Court.
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