OWN CORRESPONDENT, Cape Town | Tuesday
WITNESSES are too afraid to testify against members of South Africa’s Muslim vigilante group Pagad who were arrested for the 1996 murder of a Cape Town gang boss, a court heard this week.
This meant that media footage of the gruesome murder of gangster Rashaad Staggie has become essential to the trial, national deputy director of public prosecutions Jan D’Oliviera told the Cape High Court on Monday.
The footage was controversially seized last month from the South African Broadcasting Corporation and international news agency Reuters.
The offices of Associated Press were also raided but police did not find the tapes they needed there.
Police said the tapes corroborated state evidence, enabling them to arrest the three members of Pagad (People Against Gangsterism and Drugs) standing trial with the group’s national coordinator Abdus-Salaam Ebrahim, awaiting trial for almost a year.
Urging a postponement of the trial, D’Oliviera said that the video footage needed to be authenticated in court.
The state has also subpoenaed the media groups to hand over more footage, he said.
D’Oliviera said that Pagad had waged a “campaign of intimidation and terror” which had made witnesses “fear for their lives.”
The trial is expected to be a breakthrough in the unsolved four-year wave of terror in Cape Town that has included more than 100 bombings which, in the past two years, have claimed three lives and injured 124 people.
The government blames Pagad for the terror attacks, but the group denies involvement.
Opposing the request for a postponement, defence advocate John van den Bergh said the state had been tardy in obtaining the video footage and had known since 1998 that the media would resist.
Judge Dirk Uijs said he would deliver his judgment on the postponement on Wednesday.
Staggie was shot, stabbed, doused with petrol and set alight near his home during a march by Pagad, which was formed in 1996 with the stated aim of ridding Cape Town’s poorer areas of gangsters and drug dealers. – AFP
20