A South African criminal mastermind has been executed for murder in Botswana, sparking fresh controversy over the death penalty in the southern African country, Botswanan media reported on Tuesday.
Lehlohonolo Kobedi was hanged on Friday in the Botswanan capital Gaborone, and buried in the cemetery of the central prison, the Mmegi Monitor newspaper quoted a prison official as saying.
Kobedi, wanted in neighbouring South Africa for allegedly masterminding robberies, was found guilty by a Botswanan Court in 1998 of killing a police officer in a shoot-out following a botched robbery in northern Botswana.
But a local rights group hit out on Tuesday at what it called the ”secretive and arbitrary conduct by the government of Botswana in administering the death penalty”, calling for urgent reform to the legal system.
Under Botswana’s current system, a lawyer is assigned to a defendant free of charge, but the Ditschwanelo rights group argues that the system works against the interests of defendants.
”Kobedi was represented by in his original hearing by a… lawyer who was unfamiliar with trying death penalty cases, who failed to raise important legal and factual issues on his behalf,” the rights group said in a statement.
Ditschwanelo made the headlines in 1999 by launching an dramatic 11th-hour appeal on behalf of two bushmen sentenced to death for the murder of a farmer.
Gwara Brown Motswetla and Phetolo Maauwe were granted a retrial six hours before they were due to have been hanged.
The rights group argued that the defendants spoke the Secherechere dialect, and did not understand the language used to conduct their trial, and that they had been misrepresented by their lawyer.
Kobedi is the second South African to be hanged in Botswana in a little over two years. The latest hanging brings the number of executions since Botswana’s independence in 1966 to 35. – Sapa-AFP