OWN CORRESPONDENT, Gaborone | Monday
SOUTH African convicted murderer Mariette Bosch has been hanged in Botswana, Deputy Commissioner of Prisons Herman Kau told AFP in Gaborone on Monday.
“Mariette Bosch was hanged Saturday morning,” Kau said, contradicting a report from a South African official.
Foreign Affairs representative Basetsane Thokoane said on Monday morning: “The lady has not been executed.”
An earlier report released by the South African media had said Bosch was executed on Monday morning.
Bosch, from Pietersburg, was sentenced to death in the Botswana High Court by Justice Isaac Aboagye in February last year after he found her guilty of murdering her best friend, Maria Wolmarans, in June 1996.
During the trial Bosch married Wolmarans’s husband Tienie, just a year after the murder.
The Botswana Appeal Court refused Bosch’s appeal against her sentence earlier this year. Bosch is the first woman to be hanged in Botswana in thirty years.
Bosch moved to Botswana with her first husband nine years ago and settled in a well-off area of the capital, Gaborone, where they befriended the Wolmaranses.
After Bosch’s husband was killed in a car crash in 1995, she started an affair with Tienie Wolmarans, who promised to divorce his wife. But in June 1996, Bosch allegedly borrowed a pistol from a friend in South Africa, returned home and shot Maria Wolmarans twice.
Police were unable to solve the crime, but Bosch made two fatal mistakes; she revealed her relationship with Tienie Wolmarans by ordering a wedding dress from a Pretoria designer, and she gave the murder weapon to her late husband’s brother. His wife took the murder weapon to the police.
Aboagye told Bosch when he sentenced her: “I have not been able to find one moral extenuating circumstance.”
President Thabo Mbeki was requested by South Africa’s Human Rights Commission to ask Mogae to grant her clemency. – AFP
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