Theatre personality Taliep Petersen and his wife, Najwa, who has pleaded not guilty to murdering him, were a loving couple, the Cape High Court was told on Wednesday.
However, at the time of his death they were sleeping in separate bedrooms, and he was talking about ”getting another place”.
This was the testimony from Riefaat Soeker, the first witness to be called by the state in the trial of Najwa and the three men she allegedly hired to carry out the execution-style killing of Taliep in December 2006.
Soeker, a cousin of Najwa’s, told the court he had occupied a separate apartment in the couple’s Athlone home since 1999.
Questioned by prosecutor Shareen Riley on the couple’s relationship, he said he believed they had a very good marriage and were a very loving couple.
They never called each other by name. ”They used to call one another ‘babe’ and ‘darling’,” he said.
Like any marriage where there was a combination of children — both had offspring from previous marriages — there was ”the element of a bit of politics”.
”To my mind that was the only issue, quarrel, they really had,” he said.
Soeker said he had not been aware that Taliep was going to buy another house and move out.
However, Taliep had touched on the subject that he needed to ”get another place” because his own four children from his first marriage did not want to come stay at the house any more.
Soeker said the children were supposed to spend alternate weeks with Taliep, but this ended after ”the April stabbing incident”. Though he did not elaborate, there was evidence in Najwa’s bail hearings that she stabbed her husband in the neck at that time.
Soeker told the court that on the evening of the killing he went through to the main section of the house to greet Taliep, whom he had not seen since the entertainer returned from a trip to London.
Najwa was briefly with them in the kitchen, and shared leftover cake from a relative’s birthday party with Taliep before saying she was going upstairs to have a bath in Taliep’s en-suite bathroom.
Since the stabbing, she had been sleeping in other bedrooms in the house, not with Taliep, Soeker said.
He said he and Taliep talked for two hours, then he went to his own room.
”Just before I got into the shower, I heard a fire-cracker sound, a distant firecracker,” he said.
He guessed afterwards that that was the gunshot that killed Taliep, though it did not occur to him at the time that it was a shot.
While he was in the shower his cellphone and his landline rang, and when he emerged, he discovered the cellphone call was from the phone in the house that Najwa usually used to ask him, late at night, whether he had chips or other ”luxuries” for her to nibble on.
Then he saw police, and one of Najwa’s brothers carrying a weapon, in the driveway outside his bedroom window.
The brother asked whether he had heard anything, then broke the news that Najwa and her adult daughter and son-in-law, who lived in the house as well, had been robbed, and Taliep had been shot and killed.
Earlier on Wednesday, Najwa and her co-accused, Abdur Emjedi, Waheed Hassen and Jefferson Snyders, all formally pleaded not guilty to charges of murder, an alternative of conspiracy to murder and firearms and robbery charges.
The court will conduct an on-the-spot inspection of the Petersens’ home on Thursday morning. — Sapa