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Dewani was neat after hijacking: Policeman

British businessman Shrien Dewani looked neat moments after being kicked out of a hijacked shuttle taxi he and his wife Anni were travelling in, a policeman told the Western Cape High Court on Tuesday.

Sergeant Cornelius Mellet, the State's ninth witness, was on duty at the Harare police station in Khayelitsha when the hijacking took place in Gugulethu on November 13, 2010.

Prosecutor Adrian Mopp asked what Dewani looked like when he entered the police station.

"He was dressed very neatly, his clothes were clean. His appearance was clean and I couldn't see with my experience in Khayelitsha that the concerned person was involved in a robbery without a struggle having taken place," Mellet replied.

He said Dewani appeared emotional while talking to the officers and asked repeatedly for someone to take him back to the Cape Grace Hotel in Cape Town, which Mellet eventually did.

"I did not know the reason why he wanted to go back to the hotel so urgently," he said.

He extracted information from Dewani during the drive and seemed to think that the tourist did not seem as worried as he would have been had his wife disappeared.

"It was strange to me that Mr Dewani did not require or ask from me what are the police doing within their powers to get hold of his wife," Mellet said.

"Also the fact that he appeared very tense and nervous. I started to feel sorry for him and I just switched on the aircon because he was sweating and he was very nervous."

During cross-examination, Dewani's lawyer Francois van Zyl said it was opinion that Mellet had slipped in the information about his client's demeanour to create a certain atmosphere or suspicion.

Mellet replied that was not his intention.

The lawyer asked him if his client had been crying at the time and Mellet said he had been. He had also looked traumatised, the officer added.

Van Zyl said his client had been threatened with a pistol shortly before his conversations with police.

He asked whether Mellet had expected Dewani to be in a struggle and the officer replied yes, as he had often seen this since he was first stationed in the area in 2004.

"I would say nine times out 10, people who are being robbed, whether it is with a knife, firearm or a hijacking... that the skollies in that town injure everybody, whether it be a hijack or only R20 from this person," Mellet said.

Van Zyl said the officer had started off with "nine times out of 10" and ended with "everybody". The officer said he was referring to the 90 percent.

He was asked how regularly tourists were robbed or hijacked in that area, and the officer replied that he knew of quite a few cases.

"It happens a lot, [that] tourists on taxis are robbed. I wouldn't say they are using the same modus operandi but the robbers would stop the driver and get into the vehicle."

Dewani lawyer criticises Cape Town cop

Francois van Zyl, for Dewani, highlighted a number of issues that he was displeased with surrounding the State's ninth witness, Sergeant Cornelius Mellet.

When giving his evidence-in-chief, the policeman referred to notes in his pocketbook and said these were a summarised version of events that he transposed from an initial set of notes.

All his notes and pocketbooks were kept in his safe.

He handed over these particular notes to the investigating officer when he made his statement almost a year after the incident, on October 12, 2011.

Van Zyl said he spoke to the investigating officer and the notes could not be traced.

The lawyer said it was interesting that his pocketbook notes made no mention of the conversation he had with Dewani while driving back to the hotel.

Mellet agreed that there was nothing in the pocketbook to this effect.

Van Zyl accused him of "slipping in" certain details into his testimony.

He said in his evidence-in-chief that Dewani told him during their drive that his wife insisted that she wanted to see the nightlife in the townships one last time.

But, in Mellet's statement, he never used the word insisted.

"I want to put it to you that this 'insist' just slipped into your evidence because you wanted to adjust your evidence or wanted to bring it in line with the other statements that you know the word insist is in," Van Zyl said.

Mellet, whose testimony was translated from Afrikaans, said it was all the same according to his vocabulary.

Van Zyl also accused him of slipping in information about his client's demeanour to create a certain atmosphere or suspicion.

Mellet said that was not his intention.

The policeman earlier testified that he found it strange that Dewani had asked for an access key or card back at the hotel and then jogged or ran down the corridor, presumably to his room.

In his statement, he said Dewani "looked panicky and literally ran down the passage".

Van Zyl asked if he was walking, running or jogging and the officer eventually settled with running.

The lawyer then played two clips of closed-circuit television footage from the hotel that night that clearly showed Dewani walking, if a little fast, down the corridor.

Van Zyl said Dewani was keen to get back to the hotel because he could not make international calls from his cellphone and he wanted to phone his family from the hotel phone.

"That is why he had to get a key at his hotel first because his key was with his wife and he was fairly in a hurry to get back to his room."

The policeman was excused from the stand.

The State was expected to call a ballistics expert, who would give a demonstration, as its next witness on Wednesday.

Dewani is accused of the murder of his wife during their honeymoon in Cape Town in November 2010. He has pleaded not guilty to the five counts against him, maintaining that the couple were the victims of a hijacking on November 13, 2010.

The State alleges that he conspired with others to stage the hijacking in return for R15,000.

Her slumped body was found in the abandoned shuttle taxi in Khayelitsha the following day.

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