Phalaborwa – When Richard “Doctor” Mathebula told police he had thrown the man they were looking for to the lions they thought he was joking, the Phalaborwa circuit court heard on Monday.

This was the evidence of Hoedspruit policeman Albert Ferreira in Mathebula’s trial for the murder of Nelson Chisale exactly a year ago on January 31, 2004.

Even when he pointed out where he and co-accused Simon Mathebula, 43, no relation, had thrown Chisale over a fence into an encampment at Mokwalo Lion Project, he “still didn’t believe him”, Ferreira said.

The Mathebulas and their employer Mark Scott-Crossley, 37, have all pleaded not guilty to murdering Chisale by feeding him to lions after assaulting him.

He went to the Scott-Crossley smallholding on February 8 to meet two women reporting Chisale’s disappearance the previous week, Ferreira told Judge George Maluleke and his assessors Kate Choshi and Elphus Seemela.

He arrested the Mathebulas when they clammed up after telling him they had last seen Chisale in November or December of the previous year, 2003.

Where they insisted they would say nothing more until their employer arrived, Ferreira went back to the smallholding where Scott-Crossley asked him to let them go because “they have nothing to do with the case”.

“He told me they were just following orders,” Ferreira testified.

When he asked what orders, Scott-Crossley said he had told them if they found Chisale on the premises they should “teach him a lesson by assaulting him”.

Asked where Chisale was, Scott-Crossley told Ferreira that Chisale had escaped during the assault and had possibly returned home to Johannesburg.

On later telling Richard Mathebula he had spoken to Scott-Crossley, and that he should reveal Chisale’s whereabouts, Mathebula told him “he threw Nelson Chisale into a lion camp and he would show it to me”.

“At that stage, I thought he was joking,” Ferreira testified.

At the camp, Mathebula pointed out a “Beware of the lions” notice on the fence over which Chisale was thrown, and vehicle tracks where the bakkie, in which they had transported him, “pulled off at speed”.

In other evidence on Monday, fingerprint expert Superintendent Hugo Coetzee testified that he found nine points of similarity and no differences between a print obtained from a finger found in a lions’ den near Hoedspruit and home affairs’ records of the Chisale’s prints, and concluded they were from the same person.

Most South African courts accept a minimum of seven points of similarity as proof positive were from the same person, Coetzee said.

Source: News24.Com
URL: http://www.news24.com/News24/South_Africa/New…/p>