Cape Town - The gruesome injuries of a man whose heart was allegedly eaten by Andrew Chimboza were detailed by a forensic pathologist in the Western Cape High Court on Tuesday.
Dr Iekram Alli testified about 62-year-old Mbuyiselo Manona's fatal injuries, sustained in a fight in Gugulethu, Cape Town, last June.
He was testifying as a State witness against Chimboza, in aggravation of sentence.
Alli said the cause of death was deep incisions to the neck, chest and abdomen, and blunt force injuries. He said an incision was made on the left half of the chest, forming a flap.
“This wound was also quite a gaping wound. It exposed the chest cavity. You could see the ribs inside,” he said.
The third and fourth ribs were incised and the front half of the rib cage was fractured on both sides. The doctor noted that “significant force” must have been applied to the chest to fracture the rib cage. Blood was found in the chest cavity.
“The heart was not present in the chest cavity... the heart was presented to me in a plastic bag separately in numerous pieces,” he said.
“Those pieces were not torn pieces. They were cleanly blocked, incised pieces.”
The incision on the right half of the neck revealed the jaw bone, while the incision on the left half cut through major vessels. The neck was cleanly cut across the front.
“The wound is widely splayed open, It almost looks as if someone was trying to cut the head off,” Judge Ashley Binns-Ward noted.
Alli said it would be difficult to find that the neck incisions were continuous.
The court earlier heard testimony from a police officer who found Chimboza holding Manona's heart and eating it.
“The door was opened and as I entered this room, I then came across the accused, as he was sitting here, and he was eating raw meat. He was on his knees,” testified the arresting officer, Constable Mlungisi Landule.
He said pieces of raw meat were lying next to cutlery on the floor.
Chimboza's lawyer Yasmine Rajap denied he had eaten pieces of the heart. She said he could not have eaten something because he was talking.
Landule maintained he had seen Chimboza cupping the heart in his hands and had blood on his face. He said it was possible to talk and eat at the same time.
Chimboza, who had a window-tinting business, on Monday pleaded guilty to the murder as part of a plea agreement. He stated in his plea explanation that he stabbed Manona to death at the home of a former client last year, after a disagreement. He said he was sorry for what he had done.
He alleged Manona attacked him with a knife and he responded by kicking him in the groin, stabbing him in the neck with a fork and then repeatedly stabbing him in the neck, chest, and abdomen with a knife.
Sapa