A FORMER Namibian Police constable who fatally wounded a young nursing student when he fired a shot at a car in Katutura two years ago was convicted of murder and sentenced to 12 years’ imprisonment at the end of his trial in the Windhoek Regional Court yesterday.
“Your case is a classic example of a trigger-happy police officer,” magistrate Alexis Diergaardt told convicted ex-constable George Ndemwoongela (25) during his sentencing.
She told him that as a police officer he was supposed to protect the late Martha Iilonga as a member of the public, but instead he killed her.
She also said that Ndemwoongela had acted as if he was not trained as a police officer when, on 12 February 2015, he fired a shot at a car in which Iilonga was a passenger, without knowing if the car was carrying passengers or who the driver of the vehicle was.
The shot that Ndemwoongela fired at the car left Iilonga critically injured when it struck her in the head. She died in a hospital in Windhoek a week after the shooting.
Iilonga was a final-year nursing student at the National Health Training Centre, at Windhoek, at the time of her death.
Ndemwoongela claimed during his trial that he was aiming at one of the wheels of the car in which Iilonga was a passenger when he fired the shot that hit her. The bullet that he fired went through the car’s rear window, though.
The court heard during the trial that Ndemwoongela shot at the car in a street in the Goreangab area of Katutura as it was driving away from a place where it had dropped off a man whom the police were looking for in connection with a robbery case.
Magistrate Diergaardt noted in her judgement, which was also delivered yesterday, that the driver of the car was not a suspect who was wanted by the police in connection with the robbery that was being investigated. As a result, the use of lethal force in an attempt to make an arrest, which is allowed in terms of a section of the Criminal Procedure Act, was not justified, she indicated.
She found that Ndemwoongela’s claim that he shot at a tyre of the car while he was running after it could not be true. The only reasonable possibility was that Ndemwoongela was aiming at the body of the car when he fired the shot, she said.
She further found that when he fired the shot, Ndemwoongela could foresee that someone could be hit, but he reconciled himself with that possibility. After being pronounced guilty of murder, Ndemwoongela told the court that he wanted to ask Iilonga’s family for forgiveness.
He did not intend to kill anyone and never thought someone would be killed when he fired the shot, he maintained.
Legal aid defence lawyer Trevor Brockerhoff, who represented Ndemwoongela, indicated yesterday that he intended to appeal the conviction.
Ndemwoongela is the third police officer to be convicted of murder in the Windhoek Regional Court or Windhoek High Court over the past two weeks. In all three of the cases the police officer involved used a pistol to kill someone.
In one of the cases a police constable, Justin Munsu Simataa, killed a young man in October 2012 by shooting him seven times in a car outside a bar in Khomasdal. Simataa is due to be sentenced in the Windhoek High Court next week.
In another case, police constable Linus Nzwana was convicted of murder in connection with an incident in which he killed a 22-year-old man on a Shandumbala, Katutura, street in August 2013. Nzwana killed his victim with a shot to the chest. He was sentenced in the Windhoek Regional Court to 18 years in jail on Monday this week.
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