The prosecution team in the Jordan-Leigh Norton murder case on Wednesday called for life sentences for mastermind Dina Rodrigues and three of her four co-accused. For co-accused Bonginkosi Sigenu, prosecutors Nicollette Bell and Maria Marshall called for a long-term jail sentence but not life imprisonment.
South Africa has no copper mines, but copper exports to China are booming: the result of a cable-theft epidemic that regularly plunges whole suburbs into darkness, strands thousands of train passengers and is wreaking havoc with the national economy.
Dina Rodrigues’s advocate, Johan Van der Berg, called on Wednesday for a fair and balanced sentence for her for the premeditated murder of baby Jordan-Leigh Norton. He delivered his closing argument in the Cape High Court concerning an appropriate sentence for his 26-year-old client.
Twelve people were arrested after a second night of vigilantism against suspected drug dealers at Mitchells Plain in Cape Town, police said on Wednesday. Captain Randall Stoffels said about 1Â 000 people marched to three homes of suspected drug dealers. The top floor of a double-storey house was burnt down.
The case of Glenn Agliotti, accused of the murder of mining magnate Brett Kebble, was postponed to October 5 in the Johannesburg Magistrate’s Court on Wednesday. Agliotti looked relaxed as he spoke to his lawyers before proceedings started. He wore a dark suit with his trademark pink shirt.
In commemoration of World Refugee Day on Wednesday, the Johannesburg City Hall hosted numerous NGOs and civil society groups that came together to highlight the troubles faced by refugees, particularly children, living in South Africa. Some refugee children shared their stories with the crowd.
Some of the migrants who sought help at the newly established Migrants’ Help Desk in Johannesburg were highly qualified people, the city said on Wednesday, World Refugee Day. Some had BSc degrees in mathematics, statistics and geology, said municipal spokesperson Virgil James.
Sierra Leone’s special war-crimes court handed down its first verdicts on Wednesday, finding three leaders of a militia guilty of war crimes that include killing, raping and mutilating civilians. The verdicts stem from charges relating to Sierra Leone’s civil war.
Kenyan police arrested 5 000 people in a crackdown on a banned sect blamed for grisly murders, local media reported on Wednesday. Police swooped into Nairobi’s Mathare slum after the killings and subsequent beheadings of at least half a dozen people by the outlawed Mungiki sect.
The images are shocking, even by Iraqi standards: two dozen skeletal children, some tied to beds, others writhing in their own waste and some appearing, at first glance, to be dead. Such was the nightmare that greeted United States and Iraqi forces last week when they stumbled upon the al-Hanan orphanage in Baghdad.