A man has been sentenced to life imprisonment, largely due to the excellent detective work by officers of the Honeydew Police Station.
According to Detective Constable Lungu Nziwa, who has been working at Honeydew police for the past five years, the ordeal started on April 29, 2023, when police received a call from a distressed man claiming to have found his girlfriend deceased when he returned from work.
“Upon arriving at the scene, we found the badly beaten body of a young woman. She appeared to have been strangled to death.
“Upon questioning the woman’s boyfriend who had reported the matter to the police, he was at work as a security guard at a local tavern the night before. After work, at around 02:00, he went home to his shack. The next morning at around 07:00, he went to visit his girlfriend, and found her dead in her shack,” says Nziwa.
Nziwa says officers were immediately suspicious of the man since he had what appeared to be scratch marks on his neck.
“When questioned about the marks on his neck, the man said that he sustained the injuries while breaking up a fight between patrons at the tavern where he works the night before.
“We were not convinced by his story, and one of the officers on the scene, Sergeant Matsobane Setchedi, convinced the man that he would be in danger if he remained at the scene in the Zandspruit informal settlement, as the community might harm him if they suspected that he may have had a hand in the woman’s death.
“The man agreed and accompanied us to the police station where we continued our questioning.”
Nziwa says that during the questioning, police pushed the man to grant them access to his cellphone, which revealed that he had been quarrelling with the woman the day before.
“We continued to question the man and eventually convinced him that he had no other option but to tell us the truth.
“This is when he told us that he and the woman had been quarrelling the night before. The quarrel turned violent, and according to him, without meaning to, he ended up strangling her to death.”
Nziwa adds that during the man’s trial, he uncovered evidence that the man had previously served a lengthy sentence for culpable homicide of a previous girlfriend.
“Interviews with friends and family members also revealed that the man was wanted in his home country of Lesotho for the murder of his cousin. He was deported after being released from prison. Shortly thereafter, he murdered his cousin and fled to South Africa.”
The man was sentenced in the Palm Ridge Magistrate’s Court to life imprisonment for murder and an additional two years for being an illegal immigrant.
