Music legend Taliep Petersen pleaded not to be killed as he lay bound on the floor of his Athlone home, one of the men charged with his murder told the Cape High Court on Tuesday.
An emotional Jeff Snyders said he assured Taliep that no one was supposed to be killed in what he understood was to be only a staged armed robbery.
He also told the court that at one stage he put tissues under Taliep’s head to protect him from the cold of the tile floor he was lying on.
Snyders (33) was the second of the alleged hit men to tell the court of his role in the killing, following detailed testimony over the last four court days by his co-accused, Waheed Hassen.
Snyders at the time — December 2006 — worked as a self-taught mechanic in Hassen’s vehicle workshop on the Cape Flats.
He said Hassen told him that there were people who wanted to be robbed so that they could lodge an insurance claim, and that they wanted to be tied up and beaten to make things look genuine.
It was ”just an in-and-out job”, Hassen had said.
”I said to him, robbed? This time of the night? I would like to meet such people.”
They drove to the Petersens’ home, where the outside gate and front doors had been left open for them, found Taliep watching television upstairs, and tied his hands behind his back with a cable tie.
Hassen had produced a gun once they were inside the house, which Snyders said he assumed was to make the whole thing appear real.
A woman who he now knew as Taliep’s wife, Najwa, came out of a room, and tried to embrace Taliep, who gave her a head butt, and then moved backwards.
”It occurred to me to kick him,” Snyders said. ”I wanted to kick him in the chest, but I actually got him in the face.”
‘I did not come here to kill people’
Asked by his advocate, Roelf Konstabel, why he kicked Taliep, Snyders said: ”Accused three [Hassen] had told me outside the house the people were prepared to get a beating, and this is what I did.”
At that stage he had no idea of the identity of the people they were supposedly robbing.
He tied Taliep’s feet with a doily that had slipped off a table and Najwa, who had been at her husband’s head, turned to him almost as if she was checking he was tying Taliep up properly.
She pointed to a hairdryer as if she was indicating he should tie Taliep’s feet with the device’s cord as well, which he did. She and Hassen then went into another room.
At that point, Snyders said, Taliep was crying as he lay on the floor, and he asked Taliep if he had kicked him too hard. Taliep looked into his eyes, and he saw blood on Taliep’s mouth.
”I said ‘I did not mean to kick you so hard: I will wipe it off’,” Snyders said.
He removed one of the gloves he was wearing and put it at the corner of Taliep’s mouth to absorb the blood.
He also got a box of tissues and ”put them under his head on the cold tiles”.
He then heard Najwa ask Hassen: ”When are you going to finish with him, when are you going to shoot him?”
Snyders told the court: ”At that moment the deceased said to me: ‘I have children, don’t kill me’. I told him, ‘No one’s going to be killed; that’s not how I understand the thing’.”
Taliep then began talking in Arabic, which he assumed was a Muslim prayer, Snyders said.
He asked Hassen what the woman was talking about, because that was not what Hassen had told him outside.
”I said I did not come here to kill people. Fuck the job,” Snyders said.
His habit when he was angry with people was to walk away from them, and he went outside to the bakkie they had come in.
Sitting in the bakkie he heard a boom-like noise, which did not sound like a gunshot. Soon after Hassen came out with the gun in his hand.
”I said: ‘What the fuck was that, Waheed?’ and he told me to drive,” Snyders said.
The next morning a client at the workshop asked if he had heard the news that Taliep Petersen had been murdered.
Snyders said he bought a newspaper and went to Hassen’s home.
”I threw the paper in front of him and said, ‘Waheed, what shit have you landed me in?’ He just looked at me, and said ‘It’s not me, Jeff.’ He did not say anything more. He just sat there like a zombie.”
Snyders said his arrest in June 2007 was ”one of the happiest moments” of the six months of inner torment that followed the killing.
”When the police came it was a relief for me to tell the truth,” he said.
He told Judge Siraj Desai he wanted to apologise for his actions, and hoped to be given an opportunity to do so once his cross-examination was over. — Sapa.