Ballistics expert challenges Roux – Oscar Trial

Barry Roux, for murder accused paralympian Oscar Pistorius, was trying to get Captain Chris Mangena to concede that bone and bullet fragments could have caused wounds to the back of Reeva Steenkamp’s hand.

She would have been holding her hand against her head when she was shot in the head.

Pistorius shot Steenkamp through a locked toilet door in his Silver Woods Country Estate townhouse in the early hours of February 14 last year, apparently thinking she was an intruder.

“If the left hand was close to the head what would have happened to the bone and the bullet fragments?” Roux asked Mangena.

Roux said the fragments would have struck the inside of Steenkamp’s hand.

“I disagree with that. I would have expected the bullets and fragments to travel to the back [of the head],” Mangena replied.

He repeatedly disagreed with Roux’s versions.

“There won’t be bone fragments coming back. I’ve never seen that,” he said, sounding annoyed.

The paralympic athlete has been charged with the premeditated murder of Steenkamp and contraventions of the Firearms Control Act.

He allegedly fired a shot from a Glock pistol under a table at a Johannesburg restaurant in January 2013. On September 30, 2012 he allegedly shot through the open sunroof of a car with his 9mm pistol while driving with friends in Modderfontein.

– Sapa