A knife that was “somewhere in an exhibit room, but could not be found”, delayed an armed robbery case on Wednesday.
The case arose after two men, both allegedly armed with knives, boarded a train between the Langa and Mutual stations in Cape Town, and noticed a passenger, seated nearby, playing games with his cellphone.
The court heard that the men seated themselves opposite the unsuspecting victim and, noticing that he was totally engrossed in the cellphone game, one of them grabbed the cellphone.
It is alleged that the victim tried to resist, but was stabbed in the head so viciously that part of the blade broke off in the victim’s skull.
The alleged victim had to have surgery to remove the piece of blade from his head, the court heard.
When an off-duty police official on the slow-moving train intervened, the men escaped by jumping from the train.
In the dock of the Regional Court in Bellville, before magistrate Constance Nziweni, was one of the two men, Thulani Ngxokamba – the other got away.
Ngxokamba was arrested in the street the same day, in possession of the victim’s cellphone as well as a knife with Ngxokamba’s name on it.
Ngxokamba denied any knowledge of the alleged robbery, and claimed he had bought the cellphone from an unknown person minutes earlier.
At a previous hearing, Ngxokamba also denied possession of a knife, and at prosecutor Barry van der Berg’s request the case was postponed to Wednesday for the prosecutor to produce the knife to the court as an exhibit.
However, when the court reconvened, the prosecutor said the knife in question was kept in an exhibit room in Pinelands, near Cape Town, but that the clerk in charge had taken ill, and was booked off sick until Wednesday next week.
He said staff had managed to access the exhibit room, but could not locate the knife.
He said only the exhibit clerk knew what was going on in the exhibit room, and they now had to wait for her return.
The magistrate ruled that it was in the interests of justice to wait, and she postponed the case to November 28.
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