A man accused of sexually abusing his teenage daughter over a three-year period more than a decade ago has now been found guilty on counts of rape and incest.
Judge Claudia Claasen convicted the man, who is a 54-year-old former police officer, in the Windhoek High Court yesterday.
Claasen found that evidence heard during the man’s trial proved that he raped his daughter at a camping site near Henties Bay in December 2009.
The man’s daughter was 15 years old at the time.
Claasen also found that a sexual act involving the man and his daughter took place at Oshikango in the Ohangwena region during October 2012.
The man was charged with rape, alternatively incest, in connection with that alleged incident.
The complainant in the matter told the court she was not able to clearly recall some details about that incident, Claasen recounted.
She added that in view of the complainant’s faded memory, she found it more appropriate to consider the alternative charge of incest.
“The evidence leaves no doubt that sexual conduct took place between the accused and his biological daughter, and that this is prohibited and unlawful,” Claasen said, before concluding that the state proved the man’s guilt on the charge of incest.
The man was prosecuted on three charges of child trafficking as well.
In respect of those charges, the state alleged that the accused took his daughter with him to Angola in January 2010, January 2011 and January 2012 to sexually exploit her.
Claasen acquitted him on those charges.
She said the evidence showed the complainant’s parents agreed she would travel to Angola with her father to live with him, and in view of that agreement the state did not prove the elements of the child-trafficking charges.
The complainant told the court her father sexually abused her for the first time during a camping holiday at the coast in December 2009.
After she had gone with him to Angola, where he was working, he abused her sexually and impregnated her three times, she testified.
Two of her pregnancies were terminated with pills her father bought, she said.
Her third pregnancy was terminated through a legal abortion in Namibia, after she had reported to her aunt in January 2013 that her father had been raping her.
After the termination of her pregnancy, a DNA test showed the accused was the father of the foetus his daughter had been carrying.
The man denied guilt on all charges during his trial.
He admitted, however, that a sexual incident took place between him and his daughter in Angola once.
Claasen commented that it was convenient for the accused to admit that a sexual incident took place in another country, where Namibia’s High Court has no jurisdiction.
She found that the complainant’s testimony about a sexual incident involving her father at Oshikango in October 2012 was “truthful and credible in all material respects”, and rejected the version of the accused as “highly improbable and false beyond any degree of doubt”.
The man’s trial started in November 2019.
The accused was free on a warning from the court during the trial, but was placed in custody after he was found guilty yesterday.
He has to return to court for a presentence hearing on Wednesday next week.
State advocate Palmer Kumalo is prosecuting.
The accused is being represented by defence lawyer Joseph Andreas.
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