A "career criminal", already serving life in prison for rape, has been sentenced to another life term for a murder and robbery.
|||Durban - A “career criminal”, already serving life in prison for rape, has been sentenced to another life term for a murder and robbery he committed nearly a decade ago.
Thulani Mncube, 31, who began a life of crime at the age of 15, committed the hijacking and murder of the metered taxi driver in 2004.
He went on to commit other crimes, including robbery and theft, and was finally arrested last year for rape. It was then that police linked him to the murder of metered taxi driver Gabongani Kunene in November 2004 in Newcastle.
Mncube pleaded guilty to the hijacking and murder, and told the Pietermaritzburg High Court he was in the company of four others when they committed the crimes.
On the day of the murder, he and his accomplices saw Kunene driving his Mazda 323 along a main road in the Osizweni area, and decided to hijack him, he said. “We signalled for him to stop and we boarded the taxi, telling him we wanted to go to Madadeni.”
En route to Madadeni, they told Kunene to stop the car. When he asked why, Mncube said they told him that they wanted his car.
“We became aware that Kunene was reaching under his seat for something. I immediately pulled out a firearm and shot him twice in the head,” Mncube said. They drove to Madadeni where they dumped Kunene’s body at the side of the road. The car eventually ran out of petrol and the gang abandoned it.
Sentencing Mncube to life in prison, acting Judge Madlala Xolo said that he was shocked by the way that he had “blasted Kunene’s brains” and not given him even a chance at survival. “This just displays the character of the accused (Mncube) as a career criminal who is an excessively, wantonly, savage person, who has no respect for human life,” the judge said.
Judge Xolo added that the only appropriate sentence was that of life to protect society from the likes of criminals like Mncube.
Daily News