“Petrifying screams” from Oscar’s house

“I was convinced that that woman was being attacked,” said university lecturer Michelle Burger, testifying in murder-accused paralympian Oscar Pistorius’s trial.

“She and her husband were being attacked in that house,” said Burger, who lived at the Silverstreams luxury estate which was next door to Pistorius’s, Silver Woods.

The fear in the voice of the woman that she heard over the night air in the early hours of Valentine’s Day made her think a robbery was taking place.

Pistorius watched Burger, dressed in a black suit with her long hair pinned back, as she answered his defence lawyer Barry Roux’s sometimes hectoring questions.

Burger said: “Her shouts, her screams were petrifying… it is the most helpless feeling I have ever had in my life.

“Because of the climax of her shouts I knew something terrible was going to happen in that house. It was very intense.”

She said the screams just before the four gunshots she heard from her home in Silverstreams were “blood curdling”.

“It was something that leaves you cold [chilled]. You can’t explain it you just know that a woman’s life was very threatened.

– Sapa