Kimberley - A wheelchair-bound paedophile was on Thursday found guilty in the Kimberley Magistrate’s Court of raping a 10-year-old girl.
Despite pleading his innocence, 61-year-old Daniel Olifant was shown no mercy when he was found guilty of rape for the second time following an earlier conviction in 1980.
In May 2013 he was caught in the act by a neighbour, with the 10-year-old victim in an outhouse toilet.
In summing up the trial, magistrate Jesse Clarke tore Olifant’s defence apart, saying that he had no reason to believe the accused’s account of events.
The State needed only two witnesses to seal Olifant’s fate as the complainant and the first witness, who cannot be named to protect the victim, provided corroborating versions of the incident.
The first witness said that she had been alerted, by a neighbour, that Olifant had lured his victim into the outbuilding.
When she approached the toilet, she found Olifant’s wheelchair outside and upon entering the toilet saw the victim between her assailant’s legs with pants and panties removed.
According to the witness, Olifant claimed that he was relieving himself in crude language as she pulled the child out of the cubicle, dressed her and alerted the police.
Clarke said that the victim gave a very similar account of events and while her age was taken into account with regard to her reliability as a witness, he had absolutely no reason to believe that she was coerced or coached into giving any form of false testimony.
The judge saw no reason why the first witness would implicate a 10-year-old in a vendetta against the accused.
A language barrier did cause some inconsistencies in both witnesses’ testimonies, but the basic facts remained unchanged even during cross-examination.
With regard to the victim’s testimony, Clarke also said that the facts remained the same but it was evident that a child can often interpret questions differently to adults.
“In an early statement the victim said that the defendant had offered her R2 to keep quiet but later she said that the R2 was offered for a ‘stukkie koekie’,” Clarke used as an example in Afrikaans.
“This was obviously used as street slang but when asked about what she understood of the statements later, she did not know and didn’t seem to understand the question.”
Olifant dismissed the allegations and said that he had not been in the toilet with the victim. According to his defence, the rape charge was simply a ploy to punish him for not buying alcohol from the first witness, a claim which Clarke refuted.
Medical evidence that penetration of the vaginal lips, along with the use of anatomically correct dolls to demonstrate the positioning of the two within the toilet, further damaged the defence’s case as Clarke said that the fact that the victim was found between her assailant’s legs while his pants were around his ankles meant that the victim was close enough for intercourse to occur though not deep enough to break the hymen.
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