Soldier's killers found not guilty
Co-accused, Reevek Ramlall and Durell Govender, were found not guilty of the murder of SA National Defence Force trainee officer, Vishay Singh.
Govender (24) and Ramlall (35) were arrested on January 11, 2021, for allegedly driving over Singh.
The men were given bail on March 8, 2021, and they both pleaded not guilty to the charge of murder.
On Tuesday last week, Regional Magistrate Garth Davis handed down judgement in the Port Shepstone Regional Court.
Singh was run over outside his home in Ferndale Road in Palmview, Marburg on January 9, 2021.
For six months, Singh who was on life support, was admitted and transferred to various hospitals for treatment in KwaZulu-Natal.
He was then taken to a military hospital in Pretoria, where he died on June 23, 2021.
A medical legal post-mortem examination revealed the cause of death as blunt force trauma to the head and related complications.
Davis handed down a lengthy judgement.
'With the versions that are before the court and not losing sight of the performance of the witnesses who testified, their evidence can be criticised on the basis of it being at times contradictory and prone to embellishment and improbable. But, when seen in light of the contradictory evidence tendered by the state that directly impacts upon their reliability, there are serious doubts as to its reliability.'
He further said the more one examines the evidence of the state, including comparisons with the evidence admitted by the two eye-witnesses, Brady Govender and Avinash Manilal, the more it does not survive scrutiny.
In conclusion, the state's evidence is contradictory of the evidence led by Singh's family as to how he was killed is repudiated by the state's own evidence contained in the evidence of Manilal and Brady Govender.
'There are two mutually exclusive and destructive versions placed before the court in the state's case; the evidence is therefore unreliable and not credible,' he added.
* Side note: Brady Govender is now deceased, and the state was unable to secure Manilal's attendance at court.
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