A 26-year-old man from Khayelitsha was taken in for questioning in connection with the killing of tourist Anni Dewani (28) in Gugulethu, police said on Tuesday.
The man was questioned on Tuesday morning, said Captain Frederick van Wyk. Several leads were being followed to bring those responsible to book, he said.
The newly-wed was murdered on her honeymoon during a suspected hijacking in the Cape Town township of Gugulethu at the weekend.
Her husband, Shrien, was not harmed.
The Star on Tuesday reported that the perpetrators told the husband that they would not hurt her. Shrien Dewani said he pleaded with the hijackers not to separate him from her, the report said.
He said he felt powerless at being unable to save her.
“Of course I have an enormous amount of guilt about the whole episode.
“However, having gone through events over and over again in my mind, it is difficult to see how we could have done things differently,” he was quoted as saying.
He said the men kept telling them that they would not be harmed, according to the report.
“The men kept on saying: ‘We are not going to hurt you. We just want the car’. That was a lie,” he said.
The husband was dumped and hours later Anni was found dead in the abandoned vehicle.
Western Cape police on Monday appealed for “any person who can shed light on the circumstances of the incident, or the whereabouts of the suspects” to contact the investigating officer Colonel Riaan Theron, on 082 463 8706″.
‘Óut of touch with reality’
Meanwhile, the police are out of touch with reality for expressing shock at the murder of Anni Dewani, the South African Institute of Race Relations (SAIIR) said on Tuesday.
“Data in the possession of the South African Institute of Race Relations shows that over 700 people have been murdered in Gugulethu since 2005. In the year to March 2010 some 110 murders occurred within the Gugulethu police precinct,” the SAIRR said in a statement.
“This amounts to one murder every two-and-a-half days for five consecutive years. How under such circumstances can the police claim to be ‘shocked’ or surprised at what happened to the British couple?”
The SAIRR said if the police were truly shocked, then it suggested that “the police’s senior management is out of touch with the reality of life on the ground for people in areas such as Gugulethu, who have been left to run the gauntlet of violent crime on a horrific scale”.
The institute said it was “revealing” that it took the murder of a foreign national for the police’s senior management to take stock of the state of affairs in Gugulethu. — Sapa