Whatever happened to Pretoria bus shooter De Wet Kritzinger, convicted on Wednesday of murder, would make not make her life easier, the mother of one of his victims said.
”Nothing can bring back my daughter,” Edith Mathebula told reporters outside the court where Kritzinger was convicted on three charges of murder and four of attempted murder.
Mathebula’s daughter Gogo was a passenger on the fateful Mamelodi-bound bus which Kritzinger boarded in Constantia Park on January 12, 2000. He fired a number of shots, killing her and another passenger, Thembekile Constance Phasha, as well as bus driver Mduduzi Graeme Nyembe.
Pretoria High Court Judge Dion Basson found Kritzinger was aware of the wrongfulness of his deeds. This wrongfulness was determined by the criteria of the law, and not by the religious or political convictions of the person committing the crime, he said.
Kritzinger had said he shot the people because of the belief, based on his religion, that his former wife would not be able to remarry without his being dead. He hoped that he would be shot by police reacting to his attack.
Investigating officer Bennie de Beer earlier testified Kritzinger told him he did not regard black people as human beings.
”According to him, the word ‘kaffir’ was not a term of abuse; he had grown up with it.”
Mathebula said she now had to take care of her daughter’s three children, aged 14, nine and seven.
”He uses such awful language,” she said of Kritzinger. ”He calls us kaffirs.”
Kritzinger’s mother Ryna would not speak to reporters.
Sentence proceedings are to start on Friday.
Earlier, Kritzinger said he did not regard blacks as human beings, but had great respect for Osama bin Laden, the Pretoria High Court heard.
”According to his religious principles, he did not kill people, because kaffirs, as he put it, are not his fellow human beings, he does not love them and they are heathens,” investigating officer Captain Bennie de Beer testified in the trial.
He was reading from a statement he compiled based on a conversation he had with Kritzinger shortly after his arrest in June last year.
On Tuesday Kritzinger pleaded not guilty to the murder of bus driver Mduduzi Graeme Nyembe and passengers Thembekile Constance Phasha and Gogo Connie Mathebula, as well as the attempted murder of four more passengers.
He admitted in a statement read to the court that he had shot them, but said his actions were not wrongful as they were in keeping with a promise he had made to God.
Kritzinger said in the statement he did not hate other ”nations”, only the Jews, whom he described as the ”descendants of Satan” and the ”viperous brood”.
He denied that the attack on the bus was racist, but said he believed each nation should govern itself.
According to Kritzinger, he shot the people on the bus because he wanted police to kill him, so his ex-wife could remarry. It would be a grave sin for her to remarry while he was still alive.
In his statement, De Beer said Kritzinger had told him he planned the incident, knew exactly what he would do and knew he would be in big trouble if caught.
Kritzinger said, according to De Beer: ”I decided to launch the attack on the kaffirs, to stay in the bus until the SAPS arrived and then to elicit conflict with them so they would shoot me dead.
”Things did not work out that way though. The bus moved towards an abyss after I shot the driver and I did not want to be trapped in the bus with the kaffirs.”
Defence counsel Louiza van der Walt told De Beer that Kritzinger would testify he chose to shoot black people because of farm attacks and the killing of white soldiers in a shooting spree at the Tempe military base near Bloemfontein.
De Beer said he did not believe Kritzinger told him that. If he had it would have been noted down.
Van der Walt asked whether Kritzinger did not tell him at one stage that he had great respect for the Muslims.
De Beer replied: ”He said at one stage he had great respect for Osama bin Laden, because he stood his ground and did not turn his back on what he had done.”
Van der Walt asked if Kritzinger did not mention that his hate for Jews emanated from his belief that they had caused war ever since creation.
”It’s possible,” De Beer replied. ”I did not take much note of things he said that was not relevant to the investigation.” – Sapa