Africa-Press – South-Africa. Vuyile Maliti, one of the three men accused of assassinating Cape Town lawyer Pete Mihalik found that no local defence lawyer would touch the case when he started calling around for representation, the Western Cape High Court heard on Tuesday.
Maliti testified that he called his lawyer Bruce Hendricks when he heard the police were at his house looking for him on the day of the assassination – 30 October 2018.
Hendricks is regarded as one of the city’s top bail lawyers and is known to arrive at first appearances completely prepared with all paperwork required and ready to get his client home in time for match of the day.
However, even for Hendricks, who has a diverse and colourful client list, it was a hard pass.
“There was no attorney that wanted to assist me here in Cape Town,” testified Maliti, as the trial resumed.
Maliti, Sizwe Biyela and Nkosinathi Khumalo are on trial for the murder of Mihalik and the attempted murder of his two children just as he was about to drop them off at school in Green Point.
Roaring up the road in his black Mercedes SUV, Mihalik’s life was cut short when a gunman stepped off the pavement and squeezed off two shots, killing him almost instantly while he sat behind the wheel of the car.
Quickly gathered CCTV footage and witness statements gave the police an early lead, which was boosted by a chance traffic stop down the road.
The three accused have so far testified that they had nothing to do with any murder, and pleaded not guilty. They say any association between them by cellphone tower location data or vehicles captured on CCTV in the area of the murder is coincidental. They say they were fencing a bag of gold Krugerrand coins in the Green Point Spar’s parking lot down the road when Mihalik was killed.
Biyela and Khumalo came to Cape Town from KwaZulu-Natal, and Maliti is a Cape Town local.
By sunset on the fateful day of Mihalik’s murder, the police had Biyela and Khumalo in custody through an early breakthrough involving a traffic violation, and connections pieced together afterwards.
Maliti, however, was in the wind. Or, to be more precise, hunkered down at a friend’s house in Crossroads, watching a volley of calls come to his phone.
“The phone was ringing constantly,” he testified.
His mother was looking for him, his wife was crying over the phone, his trusty panel beater was in a state because the police traced his rental car’s tracking device to the panel beater’s workshop. The car was there because he had bumped it on a pole at a jazz festival in Khayelitsha that weekend. To avoid the hefty insurance excess he would have to pay, he opted to have the panel beater fix it for him instead.
The taxi fleet owner said he likes hiring vehicles from time to time, and this particular hire period was no different – it was just for his secondhand business and to attend a jazz festival in Khayelitsha, definitely not for an assassination.
The neighbours at his townhouse in Bardale Village would have been extremely annoyed, too. The police broke down the wrong door in their frantic search for him at the complex after Khumalo struggled to remember which one was Maliti’s unit.
At the time, News24 reported that the stunned family arrived home to find their front door broken and family photos spread out on their coffee table. The police say Khumalo made a statement of admissions that helped enormously, but Khumalo denies doing any such thing.
Prosecutor Greg Wolmarans did not accept that Maliti did not know why the police were looking for him, and accused him of using the Crossroads address to lie low while the heat was on.
He asked Maliti why he did not just ask his parents to put the police on the line while they were searching his parental home, and clear everything up.
“You could just have said: ‘Mommy, give the phone to the policeman’, or, ‘Mommy, tell them to hold on. I am coming to sort this mess out.’
“There were so many options, Mr Maliti, why did you avoid the police?”
Maliti said that by then it was clear the police were not pussyfooting around.
“They arrived there to fight,” he said.
He went to his parents’ house that evening, and he said the house had been trashed, and his father asked him, “What did you do?”
“Things had been broken. Things were just a mess,” he said. He lodged a complaint with police over this while awaiting trial.
The almost R200 000 Maliti had on him after selling a stash of gold coins to the Kenilworth gold exchange earlier that day for Biyela and Khumalo, must have been his only hope.
By 31 October, the day after the murder, he started calling around for a lawyer. At that stage, he said he still did not know why the police wanted him.
He called Hendricks, but Hendricks said he could not represent him – and that nobody in Cape Town would.
“In Cape Town, no one wanted to assist me,” he said.
Hendricks did, however, do him the courtesy of telling Maliti why the police wanted him: to question him in connection with Mihalik’s murder.
He did not say whether the lawyers were afraid, given the stakes in the trial, or whether it was out of solidarity for a slain colleague.
By then, his friends did not want anything to do with him either, as word got round that he was wanted for the murder of a top lawyer.
Biyela eventually presented himself to police, and was represented by out-of-town counsel who flew in from Johannesburg for his bail application.
He still has out of town counsel, although it is a different lawyer, as does Biyela and Khumalo.
The trial continues on Wednesday, and is likely to be wrapped up, with Wolmarans keen to know some of the details of the Khayelitsha jazz festival he attended, as he mercilessly wears the accused down with questions on the finer details of the timelines they have presented in their defence.
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