Africa-Press – South-Africa. When Nkosinathi Khumalo stepped out of the witness stand on Thursday and returned to the familiarity of his two accused in the Western Cape High Court dock, he was ashen.
As accused number two in the Pete Mihalik trial, he was cross-examined by the prosecution regarding his alleged role as the getaway driver in the murder of the Cape Town lawyer.
It has become evident in testimony that, if the Empangeni taxi driver had obeyed the rules of the road and stopped at a stop sign in Green Point, he may have vanished into the traffic, never to be found.
However, unlike in the murder of rapper AKA and celeb chef Tibz Motsoane, the police made a breakthrough within an hour of Mihalik’s murder, at 07:39 on 30 October 2018 – just because a traffic officer decided not to turn a blind eye to a common infraction.
The traffic stop that caused all the trouble for the accused took centre stage on Thursday.
Instead of the high-adrenaline early hours of the Mihalik murder, the cross-examination has been at a creeping pace, with relentless questioning on the finer details of evidence, and sentence by sentence translations into three languages in a hot court.
Khumalo, his cousin, Sizwe Biyela, and Vuyile Maliti were charged with the murder of Mihalik and the attempted murder of his two children.
All three pleaded not guilty, with the alibi that they were doing a gold coin deal, which was conducted in a car at an unspecified location in Cape Town.
Khumalo testified that Boy Makhutu, the traffic officer, was lying about him leaving the scene of the traffic stop, with a passenger, without his fine being written out.
Makhutu testified that he still had Khumalo’s driver’s licence when Khumalo returned on foot and apologised for his passenger driving off. The car has never been located.
The State contended that the passenger was Biyela – and Makhutu’s description of him matches the man in the checked shirt captured on CCTV squeezing off two shots at close range into Mihalik’s head and neck.
Khumalo insisted that he was driving a borrowed Renault of a different colour to the one spotted on CCTV near the murder scene. He said this reddish car, not grey as Makhutu testified, was stolen while Makhutu was giving him and Maliti (who was in a separate car in convoy) a fine.
Khumalo said Makhutu asked him to get into the traffic vehicle, and he only realised he was being taken to the police when they pulled up outside the Sea Point police station.
The prosecutor, Greg Wolmarans, focused on the alleged inconsistencies in Khumalo’s version of events, and accused him of making things up as he went along.
“It just disappeared? Poof!” said Wolmarans of the Renault stolen metres away from the traffic officer and Khumalo.
At one point, even his co-accused laughed in the dock at all the scenarios put to Khumalo of what could have happened to the Renault, and whether he thought Makhutu was drunk while fining them.
Maliti and Biyela struggled to break an uncharacteristic attack of the giggles, their shoulders shaking as they tried to compose themselves as Khumalo was confronted with the improbability of a thief so silent and cunning.
“It is true that the car went missing,” insisted Khumalo.
Wolmarans said:
“Why would officer Makhutu make up a story that you had a passenger and that you blamed the passenger for driving away in the car?” he asked.
An exhausted Khumalo simply replied: “Hayi, he is lying. That is a lie.”
After the trial was adjourned to 13 March, Khumalo was taken under escort back to prison, with motorists giving way for the sirens, unaware that an alleged hit squad driver was passing through.
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