Charges withdrawn against man accused of starting Cape Town fire
Representations by Frederick Mhangazo’s defence team convince State to drop case
Frederick Mhangazo and Shaun Balram outside the Cape Town Magistrates’ Court on Friday. Photo: Marecia Damons
Charges against a man accused of starting the Cape Town fire in April were withdrawn by the State in the Cape Town Magistrate’s Court on Friday.
Frederick Mhangazo, 35, was arrested in the vicinity of Devil’s Peak on Sunday 18 April, hours after a devastating blaze had spread across Table Mountain.
He first appeared in court on 20 April facing charges of arson. At his second court appearance on 28 April, the charges were changed to a breach of the National and Environmental Management Act, and he was granted bail of R500. In June, the State asked the court for more time to gather evidence.
According to Mhangazo’s lawyer, Shaun Balram, Friday’s case was on the court roll for representations, meaning that the defence had to assess the merits of the State’s case and write to them in order to convince them that they should not proceed with the matter.
Based on the strength of the defence’s representations, the prosecutor said the State had decided to withdraw all charges against Mhangazo.
“We were able to critically analyse all the statements of the state witnesses and find loopholes and the lack of sufficient evidence for them to ascertain a conviction … We were able to convince them not to proceed with the case and to withdraw it,” said Balram.
Outside the court, Mhangazo said he was happy the matter was over and expressed gratitude towards Balram, who had taken on the case pro bono.
Next: Undocumented immigrants left out of vaccination programme
Previous: Formal inquest into Life Esidimeni deaths to start on Monday
© 2021 GroundUp. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and GroundUp, and do not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.
We put an invisible pixel in the article so that we can count traffic to republishers. All analytics tools are solely on our servers. We do not give our logs to any third party. Logs are deleted after two weeks. We do not use any IP address identifying information except to count regional traffic. We are solely interested in counting hits, not tracking users. If you republish, please do not delete the invisible pixel.