In a short day in Court 4C of the South Gauteng High Court in the murder trial of mining magnate Brett Kebble on Tuesday, the defence counsel for murder accused Glenn Agliotti, Laurance Hodes, took the state’s witness on cellphone records to task.
Hodes questioned Vodacom’s forensic liaison manager, Petra Heyneke, on the ethics of providing “in excess of 50 cellphone numbers” to the police for their investigation into the Kebble murder.
“Do you see the flaw in the system?” he asked. “The police can obtain information to which they are not entitled, that is private.”
Heyneke responded: “We release information in good faith. It’s not a flaw in the system on our side.”
Hodes also pointed out that while being led by the state prosecutor, Dan Dakana, Heyneke referred to cellphone numbers by their alleged owners’ names, even though she admitted that Vodacom could not trace back who the phones were owned by.
He said that while Dakana tried to show that the phone calls made between specific numbers were calls made between Agliotti and the state’s key witness and former security boss for the Kebbles’ companies, Clinton Nassif, it was, in fact, impossible for Vodacom to know who was speaking on the phone.
While the state called Heyneke to testify, the information provided by her records contradicted the evidence given by Nassif about phone calls made between himself and Agliotti.
The only evidence it corroborated was that of Kebble’s alleged shooter, boxer Mikey Schultz, who said that he was called by Nassif on the morning of September 26 2005, the day before Kebble was shot, to accompany Nassif to Kebble’s home. The records show a phone call on that morning from Nassif to Schultz.
The state will bring a new witness to testify on Wednesday morning.