A 21-year old man has been sentenced to 15 years in jail for the gruesome murder of a Cape Town woman whose body he mutilated.
|||Cape Town - A 21-year-old man has been sentenced to 15 years in jail for the gruesome murder of a Kraaifontein woman whose body he mutilated.
Adrian Coetzee appeared briefly in the Western Cape High Court on Wednesday, where he entered into a plea and sentence agreement with the State.
In his guilty plea, Coetzee admitted that he had killed Shayeda Abdool-Leukes on August 20, 2011 by stabbing her many times, dropping a cement block on her head and cutting open her stomach and neck with a saw.
Coetzee said he had knocked on the front door of Abdool-Leukes’s Scottsville home and confronted her about claims he had not returned a cellphone she had lent him two days earlier.
The two had a heated argument. Coetzee then started stabbing her with a knife he had in his pocket.
He admitted Abdool-Leukes, 39, had fallen to the ground and when she was unconscious he had picked up a cement block and dropped it on her head.
Coetzee then went to the garage of the house to fetch a saw and cut Abdool-Leukes’s stomach and throat open.
He left her body lying in a pool of blood.
Coetzee said he had no right to act the way he did and that he had used tik and mandrax before the attack.
He said the drugs had not affected his judgement.
In accepting the plea and sentence agreement the court took into account the aggravating factors that the crime was violent, the murder had an adverse effect on Abdool-Leukes’s family, and she was killed inside her house.
In mitigation, the plea stated that Coetzee was unmarried, 21 years old, helped to support his family financially, had pleaded guilty, was remorseful and had been in jail since August 2011.
jade.otto@inl.co.za
Cape Argus