So comprehensively was the crime “solved” that only one of these men, Stratton, did not confess.<\/p>\n
And then on Thursday, Judge Frans Kgomo discharged Agliotti<\/a>, the only man charged.<\/p>\n It was a miscarriage of justice, though none of Kgomo’s making.<\/p>\n Between the crime and culmination of the trial lay four years marked by a drought of political, prosecutorial and investigatory will.<\/p>\n The investigation was conceived in the rough-and-tumble of the adversarial relationship between the police and now-disbanded Scorpions, the latter throwing caution to the wind when tantalising details emerged of contact, including on the night of the crime, between Agliotti and then police chief Jackie Selebi<\/a>.<\/p>\n Kgomo remarked that the “power play” between the agencies had led to the Kebble murder case playing “second fiddle” to the corruption prosecution of Selebi.<\/p>\n Indeed, lead prosecutor Gerrie Nel and lead investigator Andrew Leask were so much on a mission that they negotiated remarkably lenient deals where they believed these would help them floor Selebi.<\/p>\n Schultz and his associates and Nassif were offered indemnity in the Kebble murder trial if they testified truthfully.<\/p>\n Nassif and Agliotti got off very lightly in a serious drugs trial.<\/p>\n And the question looms large: Did they too readily believe the “assisted suicide” story told by their witnesses — and by Agliotti himself in the December 2006 confession he later got Kgomo to throw out of court — because it allowed all concerned a way to save face for not confronting the serious crime of murder seriously enough?<\/p>\n The investigators and prosecutors may have been justified in striking deals to get at Selebi, but they failed in the investigation of this crime<\/a>. For once, new prosecuting boss Menzi Simelane may not have been altogether wrong when he removed Nel from the case, as Nel was conflicted between the two matters.<\/p>\n But it was a pity Simelane obfuscated, as he is so wont to do and left it so late and removed the entire team. It left an ill-prepared, bewildered new team, not up to the task.<\/p>\n As Agliotti waltzes off<\/a>, he will thank a system that has failed justice.<\/p>\n The question is who decided not to push for the extradition of Agliotti’s intended co-accused, Stratton, from Australia and why?<\/p>\n Why has the crime spree that presumably under-pinned the murder\/suicide — Kebble and his associates’ theft of hundreds and hundreds of millions from the Randgold\/JCI stable — not been prosecuted?<\/p>\n These men have cocked a snook at justice and got away with it in the full glare of sunlight.<\/p>\n
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