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Johannesburg — Murder accused Oscar Pistorius may soon face an additional charge of intimidation following an alleged exchange between him and a friend of Reeva Steenkamp, the girlfriend he shot last year, Timeslive reported yesterday.On Tuesday, Pistorius allegedly asked Kim Myers — the sister of Steenkamp’s best friend Gina — how she sleeps at night.
The reported exchange happened during an adjournment.
Lawyer for the Myers family, Ian Levitt, said in a statement on Tuesday: “My client Kim Myers was approached by Oscar Pistorius in court today and in a very sinister tone was asked: ‘How can you sleep at night?’”
Myers said that she was as yet too shocked to decide whether she wants to lay a complaint of intimidation.
Levitt said he’s been in contact with both the NPA and the investigating officer.
Timeslive quoted NPA spokesperson Nathi Mncube that they could not, in terms of the law, do anything about the remark.
Meanwhile the neighbours on either side of murder-accused Pistorius’s house did not hear gunshots on Valentine’s Day early morning last year, the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria heard on Tuesday.
“In the early hours . . . I heard a man crying and to me the crying was a cry of pain,” neighbour Rika Motshuane said. “Immediately I woke my husband up and asked him ‘did you hear?’ He said ‘yes but I thought I was dreaming’.”
Motshuane said the man’s crying woke her around 03:20. “The crying was very loud and very close. I remember thinking it could have been in the house.”
Motshuane and her husband were one of Pistorius’s neighbours in the Silver Woods Estate, Pretoria.
Advocate Barry Roux, for Pistorius, who was leading Motshuane in giving evidence, asked her if the scream was high-pitched. He also asked her to demonstrate. Motshuane screamed twice for the court.
“The crying was continuous,” she said.
Pistorius sat with his head down while Motshuane tried to replicate his “high-pitched” scream.
Roux asked Motshuane if she heard a woman scream, to which she responded no.
Pistorius has claimed he thought Steenkamp was an intruder when he shot her dead in his Pretoria home on 14 February last year.
He has been charged with murder as the State tries to prove its theory he shot her during an argument.
Pistorius fired four times through the locked door of his toilet, apparently thinking an intruder was about to emerge and attack him.
Steenkamp, who was behind the door, was hit in the hip, arm, and head. — Sapa
Online Reporter