Durban - “If anything has to happen to me, the person responsible is my husband”.
On the day she was killed, this message was found by Lorraine Moonsamy’s father on a piece of paper she had stuffed in her purse.
On Wednesday, Moonsamy’s husband Sugan Naicker was convicted of her murder in the Durban High Court and given a life sentence.
Naicker stabbed Moonsamy to death in January last year in a minibus taxi in Durban. At the time of Moonsamy’s death, she and Naicker were estranged.
The court heard on Wednesday that before her death Moonsamy had expressed her fear that her husband may harm her in a letter to social
workers in which she described the problems in their relationship and that she was leaving him.
The night before he killed her, Naicker contacted the taxi driver who usually drove his wife to work and arranged to be fetched at the same time as her the next day.
In the morning, he armed himself with a knife and boarded the taxi.
He sat behind Moonsamy and waited until they were the only two passengers left.
Then he grabbed her from behind and stabbed her before stabbing himself, in an apparent bid to commit suicide.
Judge Gregory Kruger found Naicker guilty of Moonsamy’s murder and of two counts of assaulting her.
In handing down judgment, he described the State’s evidence against the accused as “overwhelming” and “damning”.
In aggravation of sentencing, State advocate Krishen Shah called Moonsamy’s father, Majid Moonsamy, to testify.
Majid told the court his grandchildren now lived with him and his wife.
“Do they ask to see their father?” Shah asked him.
He replied they did not.
“What is their attitude towards their father?” Shah went on.
“They say to me their father killed their mother,” Majid answered.
The State asked for life in prison for Naicker. Shah told the court that in 2016 the South African courts issued 189 000 domestic violence interdicts and that the country had one of the highest rates of intimate femicide in the world.
He said Naicker was not truly remorseful and that had he displayed “one of the most reprehensible qualities”.
But for Naicker, advocate TP Pillay said his client was indeed sorry.
“He’s not proud of what he did,” he told the court.
Naicker apparently thought his wife was having an affair.
“There is no excuse for his actions but it seems he was
acting out of jealousy,” he said.
Judge Kruger refused