I wish Reeva had told me she was behind the door
Pistorius claims shot lover stayed silent
AFTER three days of interro- gation, Oscar Pistorius was yesterday accused of shooting his girlfriend dead as they argued through a locked door.
In a tense exchange with prosecutor Gerrie Nel, Pistorius agreed that Reeva Steenkamp must have been terrified as he fired a volley of bullets at her.
But he claimed the South African model remained silent throughout as he defended them against, what he mistakenly thought, were intruders.
‘Did she scream at all whilst you shot her four times?’ Mr Nel barked at the Olympic sprinter.
‘No, my Lady,’ Pistorius replied, his eyes fixed on the judge, rather than his interrogator. ‘Are you sure? Are you sure, Mr Pistorius, that Reeva did not scream after the first shot?... Are you, Mr Pistorius?
Mr Nel, who is nicknamed ‘the bulldog’, asked the athlete to imagine how terrifying his girlfriend’s last moments would have been. After a tense pause, the sprinter said in a trembling voice ‘My Lady, I wish she had let me know she was there.’
As he prepared to finish Mr Nel said: ‘She had nothing to be scared of except you.’ Pistorius denied this.
He told Mr Nel that, rather than checking that his girlfriend was fine, it was an understandable response, on hearing a strange noise, to grab his gun and teeter on his stumps towards potential danger lurking in his bathroom.
‘You can’t be vulnerable and run towards danger,’ the diminutive prosecutor responded, ‘it just doesn’t make sense. It isn’t true.’
Pistorius claimed he killed his girlfriend of four months accidentally saying ‘My whole being was fixated on this person that I thought was in the bathroom.’
The double amputee’s explanation for the shooting has been brutally picked apart by the seasoned prosecutor. Mr Nel has repeatedly accused him of inventing an ‘impossible’ chain of events, rather than taking responsibility for his actions. Mr Nel also accused Pistorius of ‘tailoring’ evidence regarding the house alarm.
In court Pistorius claimed builders may have taken an alarm beacon off a wall and that could have disabled the alarm system.
On the night Miss Steenkamp died he told police he activated the alarm for the inside and outside of the house.
Pistorius, 27, denies murder and three firearms charges.
The trial resumes on Monday.