Sport
South Africa: “Blade Runner” Oscar Pistorious faces 2 additional firearm charges
Double amputee Oscar Pistorius of South Africa at the London 2012 Olympic Games. PHOTO/Olivier Morin/AFP/GettyImages
Prosecutors accusing Oscar Pistorius of premeditated murder will add two more charges believed to relate to firing guns in public to the indictment against him, apparently to show another side to the inspiring double-amputee Olympian: Reckless and trigger-happy.
Pistorius now faces charges of murder, illegal possession of ammunition and two other counts of breaking South Africa’s firearms laws in his trial in March.
Pistorius’s lawyers received a letter on Tuesday advising them that the two charges, already raised against Pistorius, would be added to the indictment served on the athlete in August, National Prosecuting Authority spokesman Nathi Mncube told reporters.
Pistorius’s lawyers failed in an initial application opposing the inclusion of the two charges in his murder trial but can “take the matter up” again, Mncube said.
Mncube said the additional charges were not in the original indictment because they are alleged to have occurred in the Johannesburg region, a different court jurisdiction to Pistorius’s fatal shooting of girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp at his villa in a gated estate in the South African capital, Pretoria, in the pre-dawn hours of February 14.
Prosecutors had to seek permission from South Africa’s new National Director of Public Prosecutions to “centralize” all the charges, Mncube said, so they all could be heard in the same trial at the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria.
“The National Director has indeed given them (prosecutors) that authority and they will be added,” Mncube said. “They are not new charges, they were charges that already existed. They were just in a different jurisdiction.”
