OWN CORRESPONDENT, Johannesburg | Sunday 12.35pm.
BOTSWANA police suspect that the husband of Mariette Bosch, the South African woman sentenced to death in Gaborone, may have helped her murder his former wife. Mariette Bosch, 49 was sentenced to death by hanging on Friday for shooting dead fellow South African Tienie Wolmarans’ wife, Maria in 1996. Bosch married the widower about a year later.
Botswana’s chief of state prosecutions, Abednego Tafa, had on Friday confirmed that charging Wolmarans with conspiracy to murder had become “a very serious possibility.”
“Although we know Mr Wolmarans was not in Gaborone on the night of the murder, we have always suspected his involvement,” Tafa told the Sunday Times.
Tafa said prosecutors were investigating new evidence which emerged during Bosch’s trial and pointed to her husband.
“If we find enough evidence we will charge Mr Wolmarans with conspiracy to murder. In that event it is conceivable that he would face the death sentence,” he said.
Capital punishment is mandatory for murder in Botswana unless there are extentuating circumstances.
It was however scrapped in South Africa in 1995 and Bosch has appealed to her home country to intervene on her behalf.
Handing down the sentence, Judge Isaac Aboagye said Bosch’s motive had been to “take over the husband of the deceased.”
Bosch is in solitary confinement on death row in Gaborone’s central prison awaiting the outcome of an appeal, a process which could take two years or more. — AFP