Advocate Zandile Mshololo was a shadow of her usual self on the final day of cross-examining State witness and songstress Zandie Khumalo.
Advocate Mshololo fails to crack Zandie Khumalo on final day of cross-examination
Tensions were palpable inside the Pretoria High Court on Tuesday, when Khumalo took the stand to face off one last time with Mshololo, who, by then, had proven to be an irritant.
Before the start of proceedings, Judge Ratha Mokgoatlheng reprimanded Mshololo and Khumalo for crossing the lines of decorum during Monday’s heated exchange.
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“I let it pass because I wanted people to think about it. There is no necessity for us to disrespect each other,” Judge Mokgoatlheng said.
Mshololo, the defence attorney representing the second accused, concluded her evidence with several strategies that failed to impress Judge Mokgoatlheng’s learned mind.
First, the defence attorney tried to rope Khumalo into commenting on ballistic evidence from a forensic postmortem report on Meyiwa’s gunshot wounds, but the State successfully objected, asserting the singer was not an expert.
Then, following a cheeky exchange, where Mshololo couldn’t get anything fruitful from Khumalo about the clarity of her recollection in identifying one of the accused, Bongani Ntanzi, the defence attorney clutched on with hearsay evidence from a man placed on record as Mlungisi Edward Hlophe.
According to Mshololo, Hlophe had indicated in a statement that Tumelo Madlala, Senzo’s friend, informed him Meyiwa was shot attempting to break up a fight between Khumalo and her former lover, Longwe Twala.
Of course, the court wholly dismissed this from the record and left Mshololo with nothing but a concession to consider.
Perhaps, Mshololo’s fall from grace came when her attempts of interrogating Khumalo about certain statements she made about Meyiwa’s wife Mandisa Mkhize and her mom’s comments, in a 2019 eNCA interview, failed to arouse interest from the judge.
At the time, Khumalo, in her first public discussion about the Meyiwa murder topic, had pointed to Mkhize as a prime suspect, criticising investigators for not, by virtue of her relationship with the victim, honing in on the late goalkeeper’s wife, considering her mother had explicitly confessed to hexing Senzo.
In court, the songstress brushed Mshololo off, claiming she had heard Mkhize’s mother’s comments on a Netflix documentary and that any further probing ought to be done with her on the stand.
Judge Mokgoatlheng took the helm following Mshololo’s withdrawal and granted Khumalo a rather lengthy rope to snarkily re-establish her primary testimony, which places all accountability for Meyiwa’s death on two of the five accused.
When this article was published, the State was walking neighbour Khaya Ngcatshe through his version of events.
Watch the Senzo Meyiwa murder trial live on Swisher Post.
