Pupil was alive when set alight – expert

Accused testifies after girl’s death in ‘love triangle’ case

GRADE 12 pupil Boitumelo Dlamini, allegedly abducted from her Letlhabile school and burnt to death over her involvement in a love triangle last year, was still alive when she went up in flames.

This was disclosed by fire expert Lieutenant-Colonel Johannes Bekker of the SAPS Fire Investigation Unit when he took the stand at the high court in Pretoria yesterday.

He said he had examined Dlamini, looked at pictures of her injuries and also looked at the injuries suffered by 23-yearold Cynthia Mosupi, one of the accused killers.

Pictures of Dlamini’s charred body were handed to court as exhibits. The body had been left in a veld near Klipgat, north of Pretoria, after the incident.

Mosupi and her co-accused, Sharon Gugu Twala, 24, pleaded not guilty to murder.

They claimed that they simply wanted to scare Dlamini off so that she would stop her affair with Mosupi’s boyfriend.

Mosupi explained that they had poured petrol over Dlamini in a bid to teach her a lesson, but someone in the vicinity lit a cigarette and Dlamini went up in flames.

“We just wanted to frighten her into not seeing my boyfriend. We did not want to hurt her,” she said in a written plea explanation.

Mosupi said she had also suffered burn wounds during the incident and had to be treated.

Dlamini was allegedly abducted from the Eletsa Secondary School in Letlhabile on June 18 that year, shortly after she wrote a test. She was allegedly forced into a waiting car and taken some distance out of town, where petrol was poured over her.

In her explanation, Mosupi said she and her boyfriend had been in a relationship for some time, but they decided to take a break as they had been fighting a lot.

She made it clear that they were not allowed to see other people as they had not broken up.

But then she heard that her boyfriend and Dlamini were having an affair and she confronted him about it.

They had taken a friend, Victor Pilane, along after picking the teenager up, and he took a video clip on his cellphone. The short clip did not depict the setting alight of Dlamini, but recorded the scene seconds before that, when the accused tried to tie her to a tree.

Dlamini cried bitterly during the ordeal, and tried to run away, but she was stopped by the accused. One of them held her while the other poured petrol over her.

According to the accused, it was an accident and they definitely did not set her alight.

Bekker explained in detail the chemical mechanics of combustion and what was needed to be done before a person would go up in flames.

Dlamini suffered more than 70% burn wounds, and her entire upper body, including her head, was charred. He found that the person who had set her alight must have stood close to Dlamini, who, according to her wounds, could not have been standing upright at the time.

Mosupi mostly suffered burn wounds to the back and the lower parts of her legs.

The expert also said it was improbable that the flicking of a match from a distance could have been the source of ignition.

Mosupi, meanwhile, took the stand yesterday afternoon and started testifying about the days leading up to the incident. She said she was upset when she saw Dlamini driving in a car with her boyfriend and the father of her child, and she and her best friend decided to confront her about it.

They claimed they simply wanted to scare Dlamini