VIDEO & PHOTOS: Farm attack survivor – ‘My wife was executed, I was collateral damage’
“What gets me the most is the audacity of it all. To come into someone’s house and shoot without saying anything. I thought it was the other way around, you first ask and then shoot.”
The murder of Brit expat, Sue Howarth, was highlighted when farmers, mostly clad in black, gathered at her farm entrance outside Dullstroom in a protest against farm attacks.
“We are gathered here at the gate of ‘tannie’ Sue’s farm,” local farmer Matthew Duggan said in a speech. The term “tannie” means aunt. It is used in Afrikaans as a form of respect when addressing older people.
Among the crowd, kneeling in prayer, was Robert Lynn, the late Sue’s husband. He stood upright, holding the hands of fellow protesters. His facial expression unmoved by the emotional crowd around him.
“I am angry. I am so very angry,” he told www.mobserver.co.za after the prayer meeting.
Sue was murdered on the farm Marchlands in February this year. Robert survived the ordeal.
“What gets me the most is the audacity of it all. To come into someone’s house and shoot without saying anything. I thought it was the other way around, you first ask and then shoot,” Robert said.
Armed men came to the couple’s house on February 21, shooting at the sleeping couple through their bedroom window. Sue was hit and injured in the process. After ransacking the house and torturing Robert by burning him with a blow torch, the couple were loaded into their own vehicle.
Their attackers drove nearly 50 km with them. They were dumped like trash next to a mountainous road. Robert was shot through the neck. He miraculously survived. The bullet is still lodged in his neck after doctors deemed it too dangerous to remove.
He had to listen to his wife’s dying moments in the dark, unable to help her.
Months later, all Robert has left of his wife is her ashes in a neat wooden box and the continuous flashbacks of that horror night.
Three men were arrested in connection with the attack.
Since their arrest, the murder docket has been destroyed in a suspicious fire, torching the Dullstroom Detective Unit to the ground, and had to be recompiled.
Robert together with his neighbour and late wife’s best friend, Claire Taylor, have been following the court case since the first appearance of the three suspects in Belfast.
When there were rumours of them being released on bail, Robert’s loved ones feared that they might come back for him.
The case is supposed to be transferred to the Criminal High Court in Nelspruit for trial soon.
Worried about the investigation, and with very little information at his disposal, Robert has been in contact with the British Consulate to help him get answers.
Clinging to the box containing his wife’s ashes, he repeats “I am angry, I am very angry. They say it might take years before I will be able to let go of this anger. My wife wasn’t murdered, she was executed.”
“They came for her. She was executed. I was simply collateral damage. I know it is the truth. But I dare not say that in court because I do not have the proof to back it.”
When he returns home from the meeting, his anger will make space for a deafening silence, mixed with flashbacks of the attack and “What was that?!” moments each time he hears something suspicious at night.
• South Africa saw a nation wide protests against the murder of farmers on Monday. Dubbing it Black Monday, protesters wore black in solidarity with all the farmers murdered.
• Crime statistics for the year 2016 – 2017 saw an increase in murders. On farms and small holdings 78 farmers have been murdered from April 2016 to March 2017, according to Transvaal Agricultural Union statistics.
