Africa-Press – South-Africa. The three men on trial for the murder of Cape Town lawyer Pete Mihalik had a busy morning talking to each other on the phone on the day of the assassination, the Western Cape High Court was told on Tuesday.
According to evidence presented to the court, the Renault Clio and VW Polo spotted on CCTV footage of Mihalik’s murder may have melted away into the early morning rush hour, but they still left a trail in the form of the location histories and call logs of their cellphones.
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These are alleged to be on the long list that Brigadier Petrus Bergh, provincial commander at the Hawks’ priority crime management investigations division, presented to the court on Tuesday.
Sitting in front of a laptop, he shared a lengthy document on a rolled down screen of all the cellphone location tracking he had pieced together after trawling through hundreds of calls between the three accused leading up to and after the murder.
Sizwe Biyela, Nkosinathi Khumalo and Vuyile Maliti are charged with the murder of Mihalik and the attempted assassination of his children, who he was about to drop off at school in Green Point on 30 October 2018, when he was killed.
The three have pleaded not guilty.
Bergh’s evidence was the next in a giant puzzle the State hopes to complete to give acting Judge Constance Nziweni the whole picture she will need to decide whether the police caught the right people.
If the State’s version is to be believed, the accused had almost gotten away with it and would have been lost in rush hour traffic. Were it not for a traffic official putting a spanner in the works by pulling them over for not stopping at an intersection, the police might never have obtained the three cellphone numbers that were the centre of attention on Tuesday.
At the traffic stop, one of the people in the two-car convoy pulled over, drove away from the scene, returned on foot, and soon found himself being questioned in Sea Point police station.
Once he was there, and the police had eyewitness statements of the cars used, and CCTV footage of the shooting, the police put two and two together, and soon the person – Khumalo – was looking at more than just an appearance at Municipal Court for fleeing a traffic official.
His cellphone kept ringing while he was being questioned.
Annoyed, the policeman interviewing him pulled the phone out of his pocket and saw that the name of the persistent caller was Biyela.
Police got the number of Maliti, who was also pulled over by the traffic official, when they went to the address he gave when he dutifully accepted his fine.
With that, Bergh trawled through all of the cellphone tower data of the three phones, to produce a lengthy spreadsheet of the incoming and outgoing calls between them.
He finally drew a triangle of all the calls between the three, starting from 22 October 2018, while Biyela was in KwaZulu-Natal.
He produced a location timeline of Biyela and Khumalo’s arrivals from KwaZulu-Natal in Cape Town, and their calls with Maliti.
These included a flurry of calls on the “dry run” of 29 October, where the two vehicles were pictured driving the route that Mihalik used to take his children to school.
On the day of his assassination, the calls between the three were frantic, with the cellphone tower also logging their alleged getaway past the New Somerset Hospital and on Buitengracht Street.
Maliti’s and Biyela’s phones were picked up by the towers as they headed through Maitland, with short phone calls still flying between the three.
The cellphone towers logged Khumalo on the cellphone tower nearest to the Sea Point police station.
Calls still kept going to him, but at 09:26, it seemed communication with him was cut off.
On Wednesday, the defence will be cross-examining Bergh.
The State obtained a statement of admissions from Khumalo while he was in custody. He vehemently denies anything written in it and says he was tortured mercilessly into signing whatever was put in front of him.
Khumalo’s statement says he was in the city to drive taxis for Maliti and was just learning the route before he was caught up in something bigger.
The trial continues on Wednesday.
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