Eight-year-old Tazne Van Wyk who was found dead in a drainpipe outside the town of Worcester. (Jaco Marais)
Moyhdian Pangkaeker, the man accused of murdering eight-year-old Tazné van Wyk, has admitted to the Western Cape high court that he knew absconding his parole was a crime.
In 2018, months before his parole ended, Pangkaeker’s cellphone signal was picked up in Beaufort West on 30 December, the state told the court on Thursday. It placed him about 300km away from where he was serving parole in Ladismith.
State prosecutor Lenro Badenhorst asked whether Pangkaeker had moved from Ladismith to Johannesburg because his daughter’s pregnancy — for which he was responsible through incest — had started to show, making him nervous that parole officers would soon notice it. Initially, Pangkaeker denied this but eventually conceded that Badenhorst was correct.
Upon moving to Johannesburg, Pangkaeker claimed he had intended to let officers there know he was on parole but did not have time to do so because the police station was a distance from where he stayed and worked. He also couldn’t contact his parole officers, he said, because he did not have their numbers on him at the time.
Asked if he knew absconding parole was a crime, he said “yes”.
Pangkaeker evaded the justice system for about four years, from 2016 to 2020, during which time he twice absconded while on parole. He faces 27 charges, 24 of which he allegedly committed while on parole.
In June, the Department of Correctional Services told the Mail & Guardian that prior to his arrest in February 2020, after the disappearance of Tazné — who was raped, beaten to death with a blunt object and had one of her hand severed — “numerous efforts were launched to trace the whereabouts of the parolee, without success”. Pangkaeker was released on parole on 3 April 2013.
Charges against him include three counts of common assault, two of kidnapping, 12 of rape, one of murder, as well as charges for sexual assault, child exploitation, grooming of children, intimidation, incest and violating a corpse.
He has pleaded not guilty to all counts.
On Thursday, during cross-examination, the state asked Pangkaeker how his relationship with his daughter started.
One of the charges he faces is that from October 2016 to 2019 he on more than one occasion sexually penetrated his daughter, whose name has been withheld and who testified in camera.
Pangkaeker, who at the time worked as a bouncer at two bars in Ladismith, put the blame on his daughter, saying she had overpowered him. Asked why he had not resisted his daughter’s alleged actions, he said she stood in front of him and after putting her arms around him pulled him into a bush.
To this, Badenhorst asked: “The hunter is becoming the hunted?” Pangkaeker did not respond and instead claimed he was too stunned to rebuke or stop his daughter.
“I know I did not do anything,” he said.
The trial continues.