Windhoek
Andre Friedel Castro Dausab, the man who allegedly slit the throat of his trainee pastor girlfriend at the United Lutheran Theological Paulinum College in Pioneers Park in February 2014, is disputing he was able to appreciate the wrongfulness of his actions during the commission of the offence.
His new state-funded lawyer Bronell Uirab said this in his reply to the State’s pre-trial memoranda. He made the statement last week before Judge Christi Liebenberg in the Windhoek High Court during a scheduled pre-trial hearing.
According to Uirab, while his client will remain silent, they will base their defence on non-pathological criminal incapacity, meaning he was not aware of his surroundings at the time.
He further said Dausab will undergo a further psychiatric observation by a private psychiatrist.
According to Uirab, they do not dispute the entirety of the report submitted by the state mental hospital, but only the second part of the report that claims Dausab was aware of what he was doing.
A sombre-looking Dausab was brought late from the police cells and Deputy Prosecutor General Antonia Verhoef asked the court to order his transfer to the Windhoek Correctional Services facility for trial-awaiting inmates.
This caused Dausab to wake up and he informed the court he prefers to stay at the Windhoek police station cells where his family could have easy access to him unlike at the prison.
Dausab is charged with the brutal stabbing of 33-year-old Gofaone Motlamme, who was a third-year student at Paulinum College.
She was stabbed several times in the chest and arms before he struck her in the neck and then slit her throat in her room at the campus in Pioneers Park, Extension One on February 22, 2014.
During a bail hearing in the magistrate’s court Dausab asked the magistrate to allow him to go to Botswana to ask forgiveness from the family of the deceased.
At the time he told the magistrate: “I have thousands of thoughts of suicide; I want to go to Botswana to ask for forgiveness.”
He was ordered to undergo mental observation to determine his mental state and was found fit to be tried.
According to the charge sheet, the deceased, a student at the Paulinum College and Dausab were in an intimate or romantic relationship.
On the Saturday of the incident the deceased and Dausab were together at her flat on the college premises in Erasmus Street in Windhoek when an argument erupted between them and he stabbed her at least 25 times all over her body.
The summary of substantial facts in the indictment says that after he stabbed the deceased, Dausab “left the seriously injured and screaming deceased inside the flat” after he locked the entrance door to the flat and fled the scene.
Motlamme allegedly did not die immediately, but after a while due to her injuries.
The trial has been allocated to Judge Naomi Shivute and was postponed to January 28 for allocation of trial dates.