A witness took the stand in the AKA murder trial, and his face ended up on the news. According to the state, threats followed soon after.
Prosecutor Elvis Gcweka told the Durban High Court on October 20 that the man came to him after testifying the day before, EWN reported. The claim landed hard in a courtroom that was already tense.
It also rattled the people still waiting to testify. Gcweka said they still want to come to court and speak. But they asked that their faces be kept off screens because of fears for their safety or their work.
“Their only request is that their faces must not be shown on TV,” Gcweka said, as quoted by The Citizen. Judge Nomfundo Sipunzi responded by ordering that the next witness’s face stay off television.
That ruling is narrower than it might sound. It covered that one witness only, not everyone still lined up to take the stand, so the same question could come up again.
There’s another side here worth keeping in view. The reports did not name who sent the threats, and nothing linked them to any of the seven men on trial.
This was a claim made by the state, not a finding by the court that any accused person had threatened anyone. All seven have pleaded not guilty, and the prosecution still has to prove its case against each of them.
The timing added weight to the moment. The court had just heard about airport footage of AKA from the day he died, with a man visible moving behind him.
The defence pushed hard on who could actually be identified from those images. The witness did not name the man in the footage as one of the accused.
The threat claim also sits inside a longer fight over what the public gets to see and hear. Judge Sipunzi initially barred news reports on what witnesses said on the stand.
She changed course on October 7 and allowed the press to cover their accounts and the exhibits shown in court.
Even after that shift, witness names and personal details stayed off limits. The new request about faces pushes that protection a step further.
Witness nerves were showing before this week too. Last week, two witnesses testified from a separate courtroom.
They were worried about being named or having to face the accused while describing men they saw near the scene after the shots.
AKA, born Kiernan Forbes, was one of the biggest names in South African hip hop. He and his friend Tebello “Tibz” Motsoane were shot dead outside Wish restaurant in Durban on February 10, 2023.
More than two and a half years later, the state is still working through its witness list. For now, the court is deciding one witness at a time how much of each of them the public gets to see.
