A parolee who should have still been in jail has been convicted of murdering his pregnant girlfriend, who he stabbed 26 times in front of her mother and young children.
Pietermaritzburg High Court acting judge Elsje-Marie Bezuidenhout sentenced Bongani Khasibe, 52, to life imprisonment and directed her judgment, in which she questioned why he had been released on parole, be placed in his file for consideration by the board when he qualifies for parole in 25 years.
Khasibe’s victim, who was not named in the judgment, was 29 when she was murdered in June last year.
The judge said she was in an abusive relationship with Khasibe, who previously broke her arm. She secured a protection order against him five days before he lay in wait with a knife at her home and stabbed her repeatedly in front of her mother and two sons, who were aged six and three.
Bezuidenhout said Khasibe was sentenced in 2005 to 25 years in prison for murdering his wife. He was released on parole in October 2017 after serving only 12 years.
While his lawyer asked that she “blend the sentence with mercy”, the judge said the murdered woman’s mother had, in a victim impact statement, told of the psychological and emotional trauma she suffered.
“She said she will never forget what she saw; she was unable to help her daughter ... the six-year-old used to be happy but had become withdrawn,” the judge said.
She found out her daughter was pregnant from the postmortem report.
Bezuidenhout said the woman must have suffered incredible pain, shock and horror in her last moments.
Referring to the scourge of gender-based violence (GBV) — and that August was Women’s Month — the judge said since August 15 she had presided over three such cases.
“Instead of celebrating women, we are mourning them.
“Khasibe has shown himself to be a man who [has] no respect for women. For reasons unknown, he was released on parole after serving less than half of his sentence. In spite of being on parole until December 2029, he showed little regard for the law and demonstrated his time spent in prison did nothing to rehabilitate him.
“When she [the deceased] took steps to try to protect herself from his vicious assaults by applying for a protection order, he killed her.”
The judge said statistics showed that between 50% and 70% of offenders released from custody reoffended.
While the department of correctional services faced many challenges, “society will generally lose faith in our legal system when an offender ... is released back into the community after serving less than half of his sentence, only to reoffend.
“He took another life while he should still have been in jail,” she said.
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