Sheryl Cwele’s defence team will on Wednesday apply for the withdrawal of drug trafficking charges against her before she takes the stand at the KwaZulu-Natal High Court sitting in Ramsgate.
“I will bring in the application for her charges to be withdrawn before she testifies,” Cwele’s advocate Mvuseni Ngubane told the court on Tuesday without any reasons.
State prosecutor Ian Cooke said the state would oppose the application.
Tuesday’s court proceedings were dominated by arguments over errors in transcripts of intercepted telephone calls and SMSs.
Typing errors in the transcripts halted the trial in Pietermaritzburg in December last year, resulting in a meeting between the state and the defence team.
Charges
More errors were brought to light on Tuesday by Advocate Koos van Vuuren, representing Cwele’s co-accused Frank Nabolisa.
Judge Piet Koene last year ruled that intercepted phone calls were admissible as evidence.
Cwele, wife of State Security Minister Siyabonga Cwele, and Nabolisa have pleaded not guilty to charges of dealing or conspiring to deal in drugs; procuring a woman called Charmaine Moss to collect drugs in Turkey; and procuring another woman, Tessa Beetge, to smuggle cocaine from South America.
Beetge was arrested when 10kg of cocaine was found in her luggage in Brazil in 2008 and is serving a jail sentence in São Paulo and Moss has turned state’s witness.
On Tuesday, crime intelligence police officer Colonel Danny Coertzen was unable to explain the typing errors in the transcripts.
He could not tell the court why a number ended with 23 in the computer and with 00 in another document.
Typing errors
When asked why one page of a call was recorded as “phone call/SMS”, Coertzen said it was again a typing error.
Van Vuuren also questioned why another page showed that people were phoning themselves.
Before the errors were picked up on Tuesday, Coertzen told the court he had thoroughly checked the transcripts for errors.
He believed the errors occurred when the information was taken from a disc and typed. He said the information on the disc had no errors.
Cwele is out on R100 000 bail. Nabolisa was denied bail.
The state closed its case on Tuesday. — Sapa