In September it is revealed that Mr Dewani is to apply to be treated on an open rehabilitation ward after an improvement in his mental health. Later, Westminster Magistrates' Court hears that moving Mr Dewani to an open rehabilitation ward may increase his "flight risk".
He is found guilty of murder by a judge in Cape Town and is sentenced to sentenced to life in prison. A judge rules that he is an "evil person" who fired the shot that killed Mrs Dewani. On 2 July , a four-day hearing into the potential extradition of Mr Dewani is held. Westminster Magistrates' Court in London hears that Mr Dewani's post-traumatic stress disorder and depression have eased. Three weeks later, a judge rules that Mr Dewani should be extradited to South Africa to face trial over his wife's death.
Chief magistrate Howard Riddle tells Westminster Magistrates' Court: "It may be a long time before Mr Dewani is fit to plead, but he may be closer to that point. It is not impossible that if returned now, then after a reasonable period of further treatment and assessment he will be found fit to plead and a trial can take place. Outside court, Anni Dewani's mother, Nilam Hindocha, says: "I was brought up to believe British justice is the best in the world, so it is very hard to understand why we are still here.
I am the mother of a murdered daughter. How long do I have to wait? Four months later, on 31 January , the High Court rules that Shrien Dewani, who remains in hospital, can be extradited to South Africa. His legal team continues to argue that he should not be sent there until he is fit to plead.
A week on, the Judicial Office confirms an application has been made to the Supreme Court to rule on the extradition of Mr Dewani. A possible return to South Africa will once again be delayed because of this latest court application. The Supreme Court application is blocked with the High Court refusing to allow a further appeal, triggering a day period during which Mr Dewani must be extradited.
His lawyer, Mark Summers, tells the panel of judges that fresh evidence that suggests that "his underlying medical condition may be chronic - incapable of being treated". He is not on holiday. He is here to stand trial and we want to see that happen within a reasonable period of time," says a spokesman for the country's department of justice. He tells Western Cape Crown Court how his "whole world came crashing down" following his wife's murder.
He also revealed to the court that he is bisexual. On the second day of the trial, Mziwamadoda Qwabe, who was sentenced to 25 years in prison for the murder, says he was asked to make it look like a hijacking. The court was told on 21 October that Anni Dewani had wanted a divorce from her new husband. On 17 November, lawyers for Mr Dewani said they were to apply for the case to be dismissed.
Just over two weeks later, the trial was thrown out by Judge Jeanette Traverso who said the prosecution's evidence fell "far below the threshold", including testimony from the key witness which was "riddled with contradictions". Anni's family said they had been failed by the justice system and would be consulting their lawyers on possibly filing a lawsuit against Mr Dewani in the UK. When she began looking for a husband, in her mid-twenties, Anni pursued the project with the same deliberateness and precision that she had brought to bear on her interior decorating.
She flew regularly to London, where she stayed at the homes of wealthy relatives—her maternal uncles owned the British pharmacy chain Waremoss—and spent weekends shopping and socializing. She had made up her mind that her husband would be Indian, and London offered better prospects than Stockholm.
A mutual acquaintance provided the aunt with his phone number, and she arranged an informal run-in between him and Anni at a coffee bar. After another meeting—dinner at the Intercontinental Park Lane Hotel—Anni called her sister in a state of excitement. Their lives were practically mirror images of each other. Shrien graduated from an elite preparatory school in Bristol and studied accounting at the University of Manchester, then spent several months teaching English and mathematics in Accra, Ghana, before moving to London to work for the accounting firm Deloitte.
Within a year, however, he had left to help manage the fast-growing family business, PSP Healthcare, with his older brother, Preyen. Before his 30th birthday, Shrien was already a millionaire. Shrien, like Anni, was gregarious and popular. Some people found him to be a show-off, the kind of affluent young man who seemed a little too enamored with his money. But beneath the flashy facade, his close friends saw a kind and generous person with a good sense of humor.
This was what Anni liked most about Shrien, her sister would later recall: the way she could laugh and joke with him, the way he cared for and tried to protect her. A few months into their relationship, Anni was smitten. In February , she gave up her job in Stockholm and moved into an apartment in Luton, north of London. When the Hindochas arrived, a fleet of BMWs, Mercedes, and Porsches, all with vanity license plates, were parked out front.
He was a bit intimidated by the display of wealth, but the Dewanis were warm and enthusiastic, and they quickly put Vinod and his wife, Nilam, at ease, taking them on a long tour of Bristol. Shortly thereafter, Shrien took Anni to an airfield outside Bristol, where a private plane was waiting to fly them to Paris.
That night at the restaurant in the Hotel Ritz, a waiter presented her with a silver platter. Vinod promised his daughter a lavish wedding. Ami was flying back to Sweden; Shrien and Anni were returning to London for two weeks before embarking on their honeymoon.
When Ami asked where the newly married couple were heading, Anni laughed. Shrien had made plans, she told her sister, but he was being vague about the destination. She gave Ami a warm, lingering hug and kissed her two children. Four days of game watching in Kruger National Park had left them exhilarated but tired, and standing outside the arrival gate with their designer luggage, Shrien looked for a taxi.
He caught the attention of a driver with a Volkswagen Sharan minivan. Zola Tongo was a squat, powerfully built man with a chubby face and an ingratiating manner. A year-old former insurance consultant and building inspector, he had recently taken a full-time job as a limousine driver for a Cape Town tour company. But the demands of supporting his mother—a cleaning woman—and his year-old sister, in addition to his wife and five children, weighed on him.
He had started freelancing with the company minivan in his off hours, which was what had brought him to the airport that night. Like the airport, the hotel was an icon of the image that post-apartheid South Africa sought to present to the world: a handsome, five-story brick and stone building with a red-tile mansard roof rising over a private marina.
Under soft track lighting, guests relaxed in leather armchairs beside Zanzibar chests and looked out through French windows upon a quay lined with yawls and sloops. The better-off among them built brick and cinderblock bungalows on the tiny plots they were given. Others packed into densely populated squatter camps of cardboard shacks, lacking electricity, water, or sewers.
Gugulethu alone averaged more than murders a year, roughly one every two and a half days. Tongo drove past it without stopping. Before Tongo took leave of the Dewanis at the hotel, Shrien made plans for the driver to pick them up the following night for dinner. The couple spent most of the next day by the hotel pool.
By the time Tongo arrived, at p. Shrien and Anni climbed into the backseat of the minivan, and Tongo steered back onto the N2 the way they had come the day before. If the newlyweds were interested in lighter fare, Tongo offered, he knew of a more downscale restaurant that had good Asian food. He pulled off the highway around p. The Surfside Restaurant was located in the resort town of Strand, a minute drive southeast of Cape Town, a faded riviera of high-rise hotels and condominiums with back alleys full of casinos and strip clubs tucked away just off the beach.
But the large windows offered a sweeping view of the sea, and after dining on curry and sushi, the newlyweds strolled along the beach. The plan, Shrien would later tell a reporter, had been to retire to the Waterfront district for a drink. At an intersection beside an apostolic church and a primary school, Tongo halted at a stop sign. Suddenly, Shrien looked up and saw a man hammering on the windshield with a pistol, hard enough that Shrien thought that the glass would break. The next thing he knew, a man had shoved Tongo into the passenger seat and taken the wheel.
Another man with a gun piled into the backseat with Shrien and Anni. The Volkswagen peeled away from the intersection, bouncing along the rough asphalt. At a gas station, as Shrien recalled it, the two men pulled to the curb and forced Tongo out of the minivan.
They sped down the highway for seven minutes, turning off at Khayelitsha. The hijackers drove around for 10 more minutes before the driver stopped the car. Get out, get out! The couple begged the hijackers not to separate them. At about 11 p. He had just talked to Shrien. Vinod tried to stay calm. A few minutes later the phone rang again. This time it was Shrien, calling from the Cape Grace. Vinod began to panic.
The next morning, Vinod caught the first flight from Gothenburg. He ran through the terminal, found a public telephone, and called home. Nilam picked up. Vinod heard sobbing in the background. He sank to the floor. I first met Vinod Hindocha on a gray and freezing afternoon in December at the Stadt Hotel, which his brother Ashok owns, in downtown Mariestad. He is 64 years old, with thinning black hair, an angular face, and large ears.
He led me to his Mercedes, and we drove through the quiet streets of the town. Sleet battered the windshield—a foretaste of winter, when temperatures in Mariestad drop to 20 below.
When Vinod fled Uganda with his parents and three siblings in , he told me, the family left behind everything they owned, arriving in Europe with just 55 British pounds to their name. Their first stop was a refugee camp in Austria, where they lived for months in a tent, until Sweden offered to take them in.
Vinod found work near Mariestad as an electrical maintenance engineer in a chemical factory. He met Nilam, also a refugee from Uganda, on a visit to London, and they married four years later.
Soon it was thriving, with a dozen employees and contracts to manufacture electronic components for oil-exploration projects in the North Sea, Venezuela, and Russia. He bought a three-story house with a garden, a Jacuzzi and sauna in the basement, and a separate wing for tenants. Mariestad, with its 15,odd inhabitants, 18th-century cathedral, and quaint harbor, was the very image of stability.
It was a place where Vinod could shield his children from the deprivations and dislocations that he had known. Above the single bed was a large portrait of Anni in her wedding dress, a wedding gift from a friend.
Underneath the portrait was an oil painting of a single rose. It had been given to Vinod by a stranger, a man who sold art from a stall at the Cape Town airport. Keep it in her room.
Nilam was puttering around the kitchen, making herself scarce. Vinod had told me earlier that she was recovering from stomach cancer and remained too shaken by the murder to speak about it. But the way she went is not acceptable, it is not right. Nobody should go through what we are going through. A flight attendant gently escorted Vinod onto the plane and brought him a glass of water. He passed the hour flight to South Africa in a daze, crying and leaning on Prakash for support.
An aunt in Nairobi vouched for the Dewanis; they were a good family, she said. Like the Hindochas, the Dewanis were Lohanas, members of the Indian merchant caste. When Shrien first visited the Hindochas, in November , Vinod and Nilam were struck by how handsome he was, and they were moved when he knelt down and touched their feet in a gesture of humility and respect.
Three years earlier, when Shrien was 26, he had proposed to Rani Kansagra, the daughter of the multimillionaire founder of the Indian budget airline SpiceJet. The couple announced their engagement with an extravagant party in London. Months later, however, Shrien abruptly called things off.
Vinod chose not to bring up the touchy subject. I just want to know, do you love my Anni? I am happy with that. All I want is for you two to be happy. Shrien told him that, indeed, he loved Anni very much. When the two men returned to the house, Anni asked her father how it had gone. Diplomats from the Swedish and British Embassies, along with the police, met Vinod and Prakash at the airport and brought them to the Cape Grace.
It was after midnight before Vinod saw Shrien. He hugged his son-in-law tightly, but Shrien seemed distant. The two men said little to each other.
We have to pump liquid into her body to get her freshened up. By now, Shrien and his father were mostly keeping to themselves. Shrien was busy all the time on his laptop, making funeral arrangements and communicating with his friends in Bristol and London. On Tuesday morning, Vinod at last made plans to go to the morgue and asked Shrien to join him.
And the Hindocha family saw their very private tragedy grip the press in South Africa, Sweden and Britain. Our aim was just we want to find the truth. You can just put yourself in that position. What happened? It should be hanging in the heads too. Log In. Contact us Sign up for newsletters.
Log In Register now My account. By Serina Sandhu Senior Reporter. November 12, am Updated am.
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