Supreme Court hears highway heist appeal

LONG-TERM prisoners Willy Winston van Wyk and Lesley Booys on Friday went to the Supreme Court with an appeal against their conviction for armed robbery and the 26-year jail terms that they received four years ago.

Van Wyk and Booys have spent the past eight years in custody. They were in custody for four years before they were found guilty on charges of robbery with aggravating circumstances and malicious damage to property and received jail terms of 21 years on the robbery charge and five years on the malicious damage to property count at the end of their High Court trial before Judge Mavis Gibson.On Friday, four years into the effective 26-year jail term that they are serving, Van Wyk and Booys were back in court again – but this time in the Supreme Court, for the hearing of their appeal against their conviction and sentences.Chief Justice Peter Shivute, Judge of Appeal Gerhard Maritz, and Acting Judge of Appeal Fred Chomba reserved their judgement after hearing arguments from defence counsel Hennie Barnard, who also represented Van Wyk and Booys during their trial, and Deputy Prosecutor General Annemarie Lategan.Van Wyk and Booys were arrested on September 21 1998, about a week and a half after a cash-in-transit vehicle belonging to Coin Security Namibia had been targeted in what looked like a highway heist on Windhoek’s Western Bypass road.It was one of the first cash-in-transit robberies in Namibia.In the incident on September 11 1998, two masked and armed men pounced on the vehicle and its two-man crew after it had been involved in a collision with a car that had turned in front of it and suddenly braked.The two assailants made off with the vehicle and its load of N$1,02 million in cash.The vehicle was later found burnt out on the western outskirts of Windhoek.Almost all of the money remains missing to today, with only about N$6 200 of the stolen cash claimed to have been found with Van Wyk when he and Booys were arrested in Cape Town, where they had allegedly been exchanging thousands of Namibia dollars into South African currency, ten days after the incident.Booys was recovering from some serious burn wounds at that stage.It was suspected that he had sustained these during the torching of the cash-in-transit vehicle after the heist.One of the State witnesses that testified at the duo’s trial was Jan de Klerk, who claimed he had been driving the car that caused the collision with the security company van.He told the court that Van Wyk and Booys had been the two masked men who carried out the robbery, and that he had been drawn into their plan.Whether it had in fact been a real armed robbery, rather than an inside job that was staged to look like a heist, that took place at the intersection of Mandume Ndemufayo Avenue and the Western Bypass on September 11 1998, turned out to be a central question during the hearing of the appeal on Friday.De Klerk was a single witness as far as the identification of Van Wyk and Booys was concerned, and as a self-admitted accomplice of the supposed robbers, his testimony had to be approached with caution, Barnard told the three appeal judges.He focused much of his argument on what he said were curious circumstances around the incident, and argued that this should have led to a conclusion that the State had not been able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Van Wyk and Booys had carried out an armed robbery that the two occupants of the targeted vehicle did not know of beforehand or did not assist with.On the morning before the incident, the two men who were later in the targeted cash-in-transit vehicle exchanged another, more secure vehicle for that van, Barnard noted.They failed to take a shotgun and two-way radio with them as they set out on their cash-delivery trip, they followed a route that was regarded as unsafe, and once the collision had occurred and armed men confronted them, they failed to put up any resistance, Barnard argued.”If this was a robbery, it was a strange, amicable one,” he commented at one point as he argued that the possibility remained that a staged event, rather than a robbery, was what had taken place.If it was still accepted that Van Wyk and Booys had been the two masked men who drove off with the security company’s vehicle, it would mean that they should have been found guilty of theft, rather than robbery, if Barnard’s argument is accepted.Lategan defended the High Court’s verdict as having been correct.Even if the Supreme Court were to decide that Van Wyk and Booys should have been convicted of theft rather than robbery, it should not make a difference to their sentence, because they would still stand convicted of a serious offence, she argued.They were in custody for four years before they were found guilty on charges of robbery with aggravating circumstances and malicious damage to property and received jail terms of 21 years on the robbery charge and five years on the malicious damage to property count at the end of their High Court trial before Judge Mavis Gibson.On Friday, four years into the effective 26-year jail term that they are serving, Van Wyk and Booys were back in court again – but this time in the Supreme Court, for the hearing of their appeal against their conviction and sentences.Chief Justice Peter Shivute, Judge of Appeal Gerhard Maritz, and Acting Judge of Appeal Fred Chomba reserved their judgement after hearing arguments from defence counsel Hennie Barnard, who also represented Van Wyk and Booys during their trial, and Deputy Prosecutor General Annemarie Lategan.Van Wyk and Booys were arrested on September 21 1998, about a week and a half after a cash-in-transit vehicle belonging to Coin Security Namibia had been targeted in what looked like a highway heist on Windhoek’s Western Bypass road.It was one of the first cash-in-transit robberies in Namibia.In the incident on September 11 1998, two masked and armed men pounced on the vehicle and its two-man crew after it had been involved in a collision with a car that had turned in front of it and suddenly braked.The two assailants made off with the vehicle and its load of N$1,02 million in cash.The vehicle was later found burnt out on the western outskirts of Windhoek.Almost all of the money remains missing to today, with only about N$6 200 of the stolen cash claimed to have been found with Van Wyk when he and Booys were arrested in Cape Town, where they had allegedly been exchanging thousands of Namibia dollars into South African currency, ten days after the incident.Booys was recovering from some serious burn wounds at that stage.It was suspected that he had sustained these during the torching of the cash-in-transit vehicle after the heist.One of the State witnesses that testified at the duo’s trial was Jan de Klerk, who claimed he had been driving the car that caused the collision with the security company van.He told the court that Van Wyk and Booys had been the two masked men who carried out the robbery, and that he had been drawn into their plan.Whether it had in fact been a real armed robbery, rather than an inside job that was staged to look like a heist, that took place at the intersection of Mandume Ndemufayo Avenue and the Western Bypass on September 11 1998, turned out to be a central question during the hearing of the appeal on Friday.De Klerk was a single witness as far as the identification of Van Wyk and Booys was concerned, and as a self-admitted accomplice of the supposed robbers, his testimony had to be approached with caution, Barnard told the three appeal judges.He focused much of his argument on what he said were curious circumstances around the incident, and argued that this should have led to a conclusion that the State had not been able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Van Wyk and Booys had carried out an armed robbery that the two occupants of the targeted vehicle did not know of beforehand or did not assist with.On the morning before the incident, the two men who were later in the targeted cash-in-transit vehicle exchanged another, more secure vehicle for that van, Barnard noted.They failed to take a shotgun and two-way radio with them as they set out on their cash-delivery trip, they followed a route that was regarded as unsafe, and once the collision had occurred and armed men confronted them, they failed to put up any resistance, Barnard argued.”If this was a robbery, it was a strange, amicable one,” he commented at one point as he argued that the possibility remained that a staged event, rather than a robbery, was what had taken place.If it was still accepted that Van Wyk and Booys had been the two masked men who drove off with the security company’s vehicle, it would mean that they should have been found guilty of theft, rather than robbery, if Barnard’s argument is accepted.Lategan defended the High Court’s verdict as having been correct.Even if the Supreme Court were to decide that Van Wyk and Booys should have been convicted of theft rather than robbery, it should not make a difference to their sentence, because they would still stand convicted of a serious offence, she argued.