By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
Former Paralympic champion and convicted murderer Oscar Pistorius has been granted parole and will be released from prison.
The parole board has set his release for 5 January 2024.
Once released, Pistorius will be monitored by the authorities until his sentence officially expires “just like all other parolees”, the Department of Correctional Services said on Friday. If he wants to move house or get a job during that time he will have to notify his parole officer.
Pistorius will also have to attend therapy sessions, according to the Steenkamp family’s spokesman.
In a letter read out to the parole board during Friday’s hearing, Steenkamp’s mother said she did not oppose his release but wondered whether Pistorius’s “huge anger issues” were truly dealt with in prison. She added that she would be “concerned for the safety of any woman” who now comes into contact with him.
June Steenkamp chose not to attend the parole hearing at Atteridgeville prison, near Pretoria, saying: “I simply cannot muster the energy to face him again at this stage.”
Her husband and Reeva’s father, Barry, died earlier this year and she said the strain on them both had been immense.
“My dear Barry left this world utterly devastated by the thought that he had failed to protect his daughter… I’ve no doubt that he died of a broken heart,” Mrs Steenkamp’s statement read.
Barry Steenkamp had met Oscar Pistorius face-to-face last year as part of the rehabilitation process.
Steemkamp says that while she does not believe her daughter’s killer has shown remorse, she had nonetheless decided to forgive him “long ago, as I knew most certainly that I would not be able to survive if I had to cling to my anger”.
This was Pistorius’s second parole hearing in under a year.
His first parole bid collapsed in March because he had not completed the minimum detention period. That was later ruled a mistake by Constitutional Court, leading to the new parole hearing.
Steenkamp’s killing happened when Pistorius was at the height of his fame and just months after he had become the first double-amputee to compete at the Olympics. He was also a multiple Paralympic sprinting champion and one of sport’s most marketable figures, having overcome the amputation of both his legs below the knee as a baby to run on specially designed carbon-fiber blades.