By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
The Johannesburg High Court in Gauteng on Friday found Ntuthuko Shoba guilty of murdering his girlfriend Tshegofatso Pule, who was eight months pregnant at the time of her death.
However, Shoba was found not guilty of a charge of defeating the ends of justice.
Judge Stuart Wilson ruled in the high court in Johannesburg that Shoba was guilty of the premeditated murder of Pule relating to his role in orchestrating her killing.
Pule was shot in Noordgesig and her heavily pregnant body was found hanging from a tree in Durban Deep, Roodepoort.
She was last seen at Shoba’s residence.
Muzikayise Malephane is serving a 20-year sentence for Pule’s murder after he turned state witness and heavily implicated Shoba as the alleged mastermind.
Large crowds gathered outside the court precinct on Friday wearing T-shirts that called for justice for Pule and her unborn baby.
Wilson dismissed calls by the defence to reject the state’s case and disregard Malephane’s evidence because he had admitted to having initially falsified his evidence in order to place Shoba at the scene of the murder, including claiming that he had stabbed Pule.
“To reject the state’s case I would have to find that Malephane lied about virtually everything he had said. But he had been, nonetheless, fortuitously assisted in his lies by four extraordinary pieces of luck,” Wilson said.
He said while it was true that by the time Shoba’s lawyer Norman Makhubela’s cross-examination was concluded, Malephane’s evidence was “far from being untarnished”, it still contained unchallenged assertions that required an explanation from Shoba.
There was an undisputed fact that there had been at least two meetings between Shoba and the man everyone accepts killed Pule.