Pistorius case continues

He is accused of murdering his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp on February 14 last year. Pistorius claims he mistook her for a burglar.

The first doctor to arrive at the scene where Pistorius shot Steenkamp testified on Thursday that the athlete was so emotional he feared he would turn the gun on himself.

“I was afraid Oscar would hurt himself,” radiologist Johan Stipp told the court.

Stipp, a neighbour of Pistorius’s in the Silver Woods security estate, said he was woken by gunshots and screams. After alerting security, he went to see if anybody needed medical help.

He found Pistorius kneeling next to his dying girlfriend, with one hand on a bullet wound in her thigh and the other in her mouth, trying in vain to force her to breathe.

Pistorius words to him were: “I shot her. I thought she was a burglar and I shot her.”

Describing the athlete’s distress, he told the court: “He was praying. He was talking to God … He was trying, maybe I don’t know, to get atonement.

“He definitely wanted her to live… He looked sincere to me. He had tears on his face,” he said under cross-examination from Pistorius’s lawyer Barry Roux.

– Sapa