Lifting the lid on the Dewani murder

Published Nov 3, 2014

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Over four years – from the moment he interviewed Shrien Dewani just two days after Anni’s death, to the eve of the Briton’s 2014 murder trial – Dan Newling, a British freelance journalist who is based in South Africa, has painstakingly pieced together the many pieces of this puzzle. Containing facts hitherto unpublished, interviews with witnesses until now not heard from, and the fruits of deep journalistic research into South Africa’s criminal justice system, Bitter Dawn lifts the lid on a crime far more complex than has been reported so far.

I saw him almost as soon as I walked into the hotel’s lobby. A tall, clean cut man, his face instantly recognisable from the photographs in that morning’s newspapers. Shrien Dewani paced the Cape Grace’s lobby, his ear clamped to a cordless telephone. Contrary to the media rumours, Shrien Dewani was still at the Cape Grace. Now all I had to do was get him to talk to me.

I didn’t rush. Having spent 11 years working as a news reporter in Britain, I knew that simply striding up and introducing myself would likely lead to failure. In a stressful situation such as his, Shrien Dewani might, very reasonably, decline the offer of talking publicly about his ordeal. So I turned around and approached the Cape Grace’s check-in desk. The cheapest room for that night was R4 550. I took it. Five minutes later I was back down in the lobby with my laptop, notebook and pen.

As I had expected, Shrien declined to be interviewed. Also as expected, as soon as I approached him one of the hotel’s circling doormen moved towards me. I told the guard that I was a hotel guest and therefore had a right to be there, but even as the burly doorman hesitated, I knew I only had a few seconds to make my pitch.

I turned to Shrien Dewani and pointed to a small table in a quiet corner of the hotel’s marina-side cafe. ‘I’m going to sit over there and write up my story for tomorrow’s paper,’ I said. ‘If you want to come and tell me what I’ve got wrong and what I’ve got right, then I’ll be there. If not, then that’s fine. It’s up to you.’

The truth, of course, was that I had barely anything to put in my story at all. I was bluffing. The bluff worked.

***

Around an hour later Shrien Dewani padded towards me across the hotel’s thick grey carpet. He smiled as he drew up my small table’s spare chair. Then he apologised. He told me that he was sorry if he had been rude when I approached him in the hotel lobby earlier. What was I writing? How could he help?

Throughout the 45 minutes I spent with Shrien Dewani I never saw him cry. But he came close at least twice. Both times were when he spoke about Anni, the first when he attempted to describe her personality (he didn’t get much further than “amazing” before he welled up), the second when discussing how, exactly, he thought Anni had died. These two moments notwithstanding, Shrien was polite, lucid and answered all my questions clearly and directly.

Shrien Dewani’s first-hand account of the hijacking was, I knew, journalistic gold dust. Unfortunately for me, however, I had left my bag containing my electronic voice recorder upstairs in my hastily booked Cape Grace hotel room. Unwilling to interrupt Shrien Dewani’s flow – and thus risk him changing his mind about talking to me – by asking him to pause while I raced upstairs to retrieve the voice recorder, I instead scribbled down everything Dewani told me in the Teeline shorthand I had learnt at journalism school.

***

The Dewanis’ honeymoon in South Africa had started, so Shrien Dewani told me, with an “amazing” stay at the Chitwa Chitwa safari lodge in the private Sabi Sands game reserve, adjoining the Kruger National Park. There the couple had not only been privileged to see the so-called Big Five of African game (elephant, lion, buffalo, rhino and leopard) but had also forged real friendships with the other guests. “We met the most amazing group of people and the four days that we had there were incredible.”

After four days at Chitwa Chitwa, the Dewanis flew, business class, down to Cape Town. According to Dewani, they spent the day of Anni’s murder – Saturday 13th November – “sitting around the pool and enjoying the sun”. Later that evening the friendly taxi driver who had ferried them from the airport (Shrien couldn’t remember his full name, only that it was “something Tonga” [sic]) arrived, as arranged, at the hotel to take them out to supper.

Shrien Dewani told me how the couple had a 9.30pm booking for supper at an upmarket restaurant named 96 Winery Road in the wine-making country outside Stellenbosch. But he said they changed their minds about supper en route. Without bothering to inform the restaurant of their change of plans, the couple abandoned their dinner reservation and diverted to the nearby town of Strand. “It was a beautiful evening and we walked along the beach and ate at a place on the seafront,” Dewani recalled.

What happened next?

“We had been planning on coming back to the city centre and having a drink in the Waterfront area, but Anni grew up in Sweden, and to be honest, she felt as if the area around [our] hotel was just like at home: so clean and safe, and to be honest, a bit sterile,” Shrien Dewani told me.

According to Dewani, Anni suggested another trip, back into Gugulethu. “She had never been to Africa before, so she suggested that we should have a look at the ‘real Africa’ [...] the stop was on the way back here and was intended so we could experience a township,” Shrien said.

“We were barely in the township before the attack happened. In fact, I could see the motorway turnoff when it occurred [...] it was two African male gunmen. Both armed [...] they were banging their guns on the windows. One of them was using his gun to smash the driver’s window.”

I asked Shrien how he had escaped.

“I was dumped through the back of the passenger window as the car was moving. I landed on a patch of sand, landing first on my shoulder and then forehead. It was the middle of the township [...] I knocked on the doors of some shacks, but no one opened up. Then I noticed a man who was putting away his car and he agreed to call the police.”

And as for Anni’s fate?

All Shrien could tell me, he said, was what the police had told him. She had been shot dead.

“She is amazing,” Shrien said. Then he shuddered. “I mean, she was amazing. She loved life. She was so full of character. She had more friends than you could possibly imagine. She loved people and she loved life and she was always, always happy.” Shrien paused to compose himself. “We were going to go and live back in London. She was really excited about the move. She had wanted to move there for ages. She had various options for jobs, all of which were due to start in 2011. I have no idea how I’m going to live now.”

***

I must confess that the impression Shrien Dewani made on me that Monday afternoon was a good one. He seemed to me to be a decent man thrust, through little fault of his own, into a terrible situation. He gave no inkling of being anything other than the traumatised victim of a terrible crime.

But there were dubious elements to Shrien’s tale. For a start, it seemed obvious to me that the Dewanis’ hijacking must, in some way, have been an inside job. Surely, I thought, the hijackers must have known in advance where the taxi would be that night?

The only alternative explanation I could think of was that they experienced the extraordinary good fortune of happening upon a taxi containing wealthy, cash-carrying tourists in a place and at a time when wealthy, cash-carrying tourists are rarely found.

I pressed Shrien for his views on the driver he said he knew only as “Tonga”. Was he suspicious of his role?

“We couldn’t understand how [the hijackers] knew about us,” he replied. “Initially I had a lot of suspicion about the driver, but he spent all of Sunday helping the police and was able to answer all the police’s questions. By the end of it, I quite liked him.”

I can still picture Shrien’s almost beatific expression as he explained this reasoning. Just three weeks after this exoneration, Zola Tongo – the man Shrien told me he had “quite liked” – would receive an 18-year prison sentence for arranging Anni’s murder. If Shrien Dewani was telling the truth, then he had made a stupendously bad misjudgement of character.

Then there was the moment Shrien Dewani spoke about fate. “I don’t know if you believe in fate?” he asked. “But prior to last Saturday we had spoken to literally no one while we were on honeymoon. However, on the afternoon of the attack, Anni suggested that we should talk to our families. We phoned them all: our grandparents and aunts and told them what a wonderful time we were having.”

Shrien Dewani didn’t elaborate, but Hindus, I knew, place great store in karma, the theological concept which rules that the course of all human lives is divinely preordained. Did Shrien Dewani think that his wife was somehow pre-destined to die?

* Bitter Dawn by Dan Newling is published by Jonathan Ball Publishers at a recommended retail price of R220.

Saturday Star

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