A police officer had to cut the skin off a finger found in a lions’ den in Hoedspruit in order to get a fingerprint, the Phalaborwa Circuit Court heard on Monday.
The court is trying three men accused of murdering Nelson Chisale by feeding him to lions in January 2004.
Mark Scott-Crossley (37), Richard ”Doctor” Mathebula (41), and Simon Mathebula (43) are accused of Chisale’s murder. All three have pleaded not guilty.
Inspector Teunis Briers described how he cut the finger to the bone, sliced off the fingerprint and scraped away the fatty tissue. He then placed the skin over one of his own gloved fingers, rolled it in ink and made a series of fingerprints on a sheet of paper.
Briers is a police facial-reconstructive technician.
He opened the envelope, took out the finger and placed it in an plastic evidence bottle, which he then filled with water to soften the digit ”because it was quite dried out”.
”Later on, with a scalpel, I cut the skin off from the finger, where the fingerprint is. I cut quite deep, to the bone,” Briers told the court. He put the tissue back into water to soften it more.
He then took the piece of flesh and scraped off the fatty tissue on the inside, ”so that I only have the skin to work with”. He had been trying to make it as elastic as possible to get the best possible fingerprint.
He fingerprinted it only when the skin was ”quite soft”. Briers held up in court a bag containing the small piece of skin.
He had ”no idea” which finger the print was from, nor could he say whether the print obtained was that of Chisale, he said, emphasising that he is not a fingerprint expert. He had received a whole finger — with three phalanges and two joints. It had not been cut from a hand, he continued.
As it was dried out, it had gone through a stage of decomposition, he testified before Judge George Maluleke and assessors Kate Choshi and Elphus Seemela. However, decomposition could not change the design and shape of the fingerprint. The further the decomposition, the more damaged the skin and the poorer the quality of the print. In his opinion, the prints were reliable.
Briers sent the print to the Criminal Records Centre, in Pretoria, for identification. He sent a box containing skeletal remains — which he received at the same time as the finger — to the University of Pretoria’s anthropology department for examination and analysis.
Police fingerprint expert Superintendent Hugo Coetzee testified that he positively identified the print as that of Chisale, from his left index finger. He had compared it with copies of a full set of his fingerprints obtained from the Department of Home Affairs.
Before the case resumed on Monday morning, a police sniffer dog, trained to locate explosives, searched the court. There was nobody in the public gallery at the time and no need to evacuate anyone from the room.
While the two-year-old German shepherd named Paden went on to look for incendiary devices in the chambers of Maluleke and his assessors, a detective from the Tzaneen explosives unit did a ”bomb sweep”, visually scanning the court and inspecting the cupboards, benches, ceiling and its installations for any devices.
Superintendent Hlomogi Mogane, Hoedspruit police station commissioner, said nothing was found.
”You’re all safe,” he said.
Neither he nor the other police on the scene would not reveal whether any bomb threats had been received. Chief Magistrate Jeanette du Toit was not even informed of the presence of the explosives unit at the court. — Sapa