Daughter recalls stepdad’s callousness

Alvin Maistry

Alvin Maistry

Published Jul 30, 2015

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Durban - A 15-year-old on Wednesday testified that she had telephoned her stepfather during a robbery at their Merebank home telling him to please come home quickly, to which he responded that she should let them take what they wanted.

When she told him they were taking her mother, he allegedly replied “And then?”

Rohaena Naidoo’s mother, Soraya “Charmaine” Naidoo was murdered in February last year after she had been abducted, at gunpoint, from her home in what initially appeared to be a robbery.

Naidoo’s body was later found in uMbumbulu. She had been strangled and stabbed.

Naidoo’s husband, Inderesan “Alvin” Maistry, and his co-accused, Bongani Manyathi and Mandlenkosi Jobe, pleaded not guilty on Monday to charges of murder, kidnapping and robbery with aggravating circumstances before Durban High Court Acting Judge Burt Laing.

It is alleged Maistry had planned the murder plot and hired Jobe to assist him. Jobe then apparently hired Manyathi and another man, Sifiso Joyisa, to carry out the crimes.

Joyisa last year pleaded guilty to Naidoo’s murder and was sentenced to 40 years in jail.

In his plea, he said Jobe had hired him and Manyathi to kill Naidoo, but said Maistry had been “the boss” who had order-ed the murder.

On Wednesday, Rohaena testified that her mother and Maistry had been married for seven years and described their relationship as “tense”, and said that they often argued.

On February 17 last year, she had spent the day with her mother at the supermarket her mother and Maistry owned. She said Maistry had insisted Naidoo close the shop early, saying it was quiet.

Her three uncles and aunt were also with them in the shop and also lived with them.

When they all, except Maistry, arrived home, Rohaena said they were exhausted and merely latched their gate and had left the door open.

While in the bathroom she heard a commotion, but thought it was from outside.

She was grabbed by a man standing in the passage when she came out to investigate, and taken to a room where everyone else was being held.

“My mum screamed for him not to hurt me,” she recalled.

Everyone, she said, was made to sit on the floor and when one of the men could not start Naidoo’s car, he then asked Naidoo to come with him. “Uncle Junaid asked the man not to take my mum and said he could drive. The man then said: ‘No, we came for her’.”

This was when Rohaena texted Maistry and, when he did not reply, she phoned him.

She cut the call after Maistry’s response because of the state she was in and because of what he said.

She testified that Maistry arrived home an hour after the robbery, but just dropped off her uncle and left without speaking to anyone.

The police, she said, informed them at midnight that the car had been found.

Maistry drove all of them to the site at a frustratingly slow pace, said Rohaena.

“When he got there, he ran straight to the car and said there was no blood and that they didn’t kill her in the car,” she said.

Earlier, Junaid Narasiah, Naidoo’s brother, testified.

During cross-examination, Maistry’s lawyer, Shane Matthews, put it to Narasiah that it was only after Maistry’s arrest and their second batch of statements had been taken that Maistry was implicated in Naidoo’s murder. He said it was also heard for the first time that the robbers specifically wanted Naidoo.

When State advocate Nadira Moosa asked Narasiah if it had occurred to him at the time of the incident, and later that night when his police statement was first taken, that Maistry might have been involved, he replied it had not.

The trial continues.

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