A British businessman has been arrested at the request of South African authorities on suspicion of conspiring to have his Swedish bride murdered while on honeymoon, police said yesterday.
Shrien Dewani, 30, surrendered himself to authorities in Bristol, southwest England, late on Tuesday and was detained by London police in connection with the killing of his wife in South Africa. He is accused of hatching a plot to murder Anni Dewani, 28, who was killed after the car in which the pair was traveling was reportedly hijacked on the outskirts of Cape Town on Nov. 13.
“Officers from the Metropolitan Police Service’s Extradition Unit have ... arrested Shrien Prakash Dewani, 30, on behalf of the South African authorities,” a statement from the London force said.
It lists the allegation against him as: “On 13 November 2010, in Cape Town, South Africa, conspired with others to murder Anni Dewani.”
He was due to appear in a London court later yesterday.
Shrien Dewani’s alleged involvement in the murder emerged in a South African court on Tuesday, marking a sensational twist in the killing of his young wife, whose bullet-riddled body was found in an impoverished township neighborhood.
He returned to Britain days after the incident, in which he was unharmed and has denied involvement, but the court heard allegations he connived with a taxi driver to stage a robbery and have his wife shot dead.
Three men were originally charged with the murder, but as part of a plea bargain the High Court in Cape Town heard one of the accused allege that the husband ordered the killing.
“The deceased was murdered at the instance of her husband,” Western Cape director of public prosecutions Rodney de Kock told judge John Hlophe in court, South African news agency SAPA reported.
The claim that Dewani plotted the murder was made by Zola Tongo, the driver of the taxi in which the couple were traveling in near Cape Town. Tongo was sentenced to 18 years in jail on Tuesday after pleading guilty to murder and aggravated robbery.
National Prosecuting Authority spokesman Eric Ntabazalila told reporters that Tongo had given evidence that he was approached by the Briton and promised 15,000 rand (US$2,175) “to remove someone off the scene.”
Tongo’s plea bargain documents reveal that the hijacking was part of a plan devised together with Dewani to conceal the murder.
“Threatening me and Shrien Dewani with a firearm was a mere pretense of force...” he said.
The two other men accused of Dewani’s killing are due to face trial on Feb. 25.
Prior to the killing, the honeymooners had dined in a seaside restaurant in a town outside Cape Town and were on their way back to the city when Anni Dewani asked to see township nightlife, according to reports at the time.
However, court documents released on Tuesday said this was part of a plan of subterfuge concocted by the victim’s husband and Tongo.
Tongo told the court he carefully went through the hijacking and murder details with Dewani, even taking him to a blackmarket foreign exchange dealer in Cape Town to arrange payment and avoid a bank audit trail.
“The agreement was that after the hijacking of the vehicle, Shrien Dewani and I would be ejected from the vehicle unharmed ... the deceased would be kidnapped and robbed, before she was murdered,” Tongo testified.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
STOPOVERS: As organized crime groups in Asia and the Americas move drugs via places such as Tonga, methamphetamine use has reached levels called ‘epidemic’ A surge of drugs is engulfing the South Pacific as cartels and triads use far-flung island nations to channel narcotics across the globe, top police and UN officials told reporters. Pacific island nations such as Fiji and Tonga sit at the crossroads of largely unpatrolled ocean trafficking routes used to shift cocaine from Latin America, and methamphetamine and opioids from Asia. This illicit cargo is increasingly spilling over into local hands, feeding drug addiction in communities where serious crime had been rare. “We’re a victim of our geographical location. An ideal transit point for vessels crossing the Pacific,” Tonga Police Commissioner Shane McLennan
RSS