Bomb-disposal experts swept a Phalaborwa courtroom for incendiary devices, the front row of the public gallery was cleared to make way for a line of police crowd-control officers, and parking outside the court was cordoned off in preparation for judgement in the lion murder trial of Mark Scott-Crossley and Simon Mathebula on Thursday.
Climbing on to wooden benches lining the outside walls of the courtroom, the explosives police scanned the upper windowsills, then poked torches behind wall-mounted fire-extinguisher hoses, pushing out the bits of rubbish lodged behind them.
For the first time since the start of the trial, Scott-Crossley’s mother, Noreen Breeds, arrived at the court to support her son.
Dressed in a dark-green pants suit, she said he has been receiving such bad press that the family decided she should be there.
It is a tense morning for the family, said his father, Paul Scott-Crossley.
Mark Scott-Crossley (37) and co-accused Simon Mathebula (43) have pleaded not guilty to murdering Nelson Chisale (41), who was viciously assaulted and then fed to lions at the Mokwalo White Lion Project in Hoedspruit on January 31 last year.
His arms resting on the bars of the gate to his holding cell at the court, Mathebula, wearing the same blue and khaki jacket he has worn since the start of the trial at the end of January, stared impassively at the group of photographers pointing their lenses at him.
All attention, however, was on a woman in a bright red suit, seated directly behind the dock in the second row of the public gallery. Fetsang Jafta, Chisale’s niece, has been at court every day since the trial started.
In the witness stand at one stage, she told the court how she reported him missing to the police when he failed to come home after visiting the Scott-Crossley farm.
All that was found of Chisale in the encampment was a shaft of long bones, a skull with no mandible, fragments of rib, vertebrae, a pelvic girdle and a finger, his shredded shirt and a ripped pair of khaki trousers.
The remains were buried at his birthplace at Maboloka village, in Brits, North West, last March.
A third accused, Richard Mathebula (41), has also entered a not-guilty plea, but will be tried separately when he recovers from the suspected tuberculosis for which he has been hospitalised. — Sapa