A Cape Town man has denied that he doused his ex-girlfriend and two others with petrol before setting them alight.
|||Cape Town - A Factreton man has denied that he doused his ex-girlfriend and two other people with petrol before setting them alight inside a wendy house last year.
Shaun Jacobs pleaded not guilty to three counts of attempted murder and one of arson regarding the August 11 incident.
It is the State’s case that Jacobs set the wendy house alight because his ex-girlfriend, Gasbeyah Abduragmaan, no longer wanted to be in a relationship with him.
Abduragmaan had been living in the one-room wendy house with a friend, Anne Petersen, for about three months before the incident.
Abduragmaan testified in the Cape Town Regional Court that she left Jacobs and went to live with Petersen to get away from her boyfriend.
Petersen, Abduragmaan and a man, Junane Jacobs, were in the wendy house on the day of the attack.
Shaun Jacobs arrived at the house at about 9am and demanded to speak to Abduragmaan.
She said he should leave. “I told him I wanted nothing to do with him,” Abduragmaan testified.
Two hours later, he allegedly returned holding something behind his back.
Jacobs allegedly threw a fluid - the trio believe it was petrol - into the wendy house and it caught fire.
Abduragmaan and Junane Jacobs spent seven weeks and 12 days in hospital respectively.
Abduragmaan, who had severe burns to her face and back, told the court that she ended her relationship with Jacobs because he abused her physically and emotionally and accused her of having an affair.
She denied the infidelity claims, saying that she had loved him.
“ We were together for seven years. I worked for him. I was good to him.”
The court heard that she had moved back in with him after the incident.
“I loved him and I forgave him,” Abduragmaan said when magistrate Jan van Zyl questioned her about why she returned to live with her ex-boyfriend.
The court also heard that the trio had smoked tik the night before the fire, but Abduragmaan denied that they had been smoking that morning.
The case continues.
jade.otto@inl.co.za
Cape Argus