An administration clerk on Thursday recalled how she pleaded for her life when Lieutenant Sibusiso Madubela, who killed eight people at the Tempe military base in Bloemfontein on September 16 last year, pointed his rifle at her.
"I looked straight into the barrel of the gun, I can still remember how shiny it was," Anna Johanna Susanna Naude told a judicial inquiry at the Bloemfontein High Court.
"I held up my hands and said: 'No lieutenant, not me'. I fell behind my desk and heard a shot."
Naude said she waited for Madubela to come around and shoot her under the desk.
"I knew the moment he entered my office he was going to kill me."
She said he fired one more shot before leaving her office, but she was not hit.
A tearful Naude said she had worked with Madubela for six months before the shooting, and was afraid of him.
He had a quick temper and was easily provoked. She said she tried to stay in his good books by lending him money and giving him food.
As a result, they were on good terms.
"I was always afraid of him turning against me and harbouring a grudge. I was scared that he would do something to me."
Naude said that Madubela was not liked by white and black colleagues alike.
He often turned "normal quarrels into racial issues", she said.
On the day of the shooting, Naude was in the administration building where Sergeant Major Johannes Frederick Lombard was shot dead.
Sergeant Johannes Lenkoane, who was also in the building, told the inquiry he heard shots in the adjacent battalion headquarters.
When he heard the shots coming closer, he closed the door between the two buildings and held on to the door.
Hearing the commotion, Lombard came out of his office, and grabbed the door handle from Lenkoane, asking: "What is going on?".
He opened the door and was shot.
Administration clerk Helena Dorothea Oosthuizen testified that Madubela then shot Lombard as he lay wounded on the floor.
"The sergeant-major lifted his head, and Madubela shot him in the head," she said.
"He placed the rifle behind his ear and pulled the trigger."
Oosthuizen, who was standing about three paces from the gunman, said she was unable to erase Madubela's face from her memory.
"His eyes were wild and wide open and his lips were curled. It is not a face one forgets easily."
Catharina Maria Els, who was in the battalion headquarters building when the shooting took place, testified that the gunman had come to her office the previous day (payday) and asked to speak to the unit commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Jan Jurie Wessels, about the fact that his salary had been stopped after he had been declared absent without leave. - Sapa