Cape Town - Moyhdian Pangkaeker had family and community members storming out of the courtroom when he testified that he didn’t see what happened to Tazne van Wyk but saw her body being dumped.
Pangkaeker, 57, has been in the witness box since Monday, testifying in his own defence as he faces charges for the rape, kidnap and murder of the 8-year-old girl, who went missing from Clare Street, Connaught Estate, Elsies River, on February 7, 2020 and never came home.
He on Wednesday continued with the tale of how he and Tazne had been followed by “bongos” (foreign nationals) after they got into a taxi with four people who drove them to the N1, dropped them at a petrol station and came back hours later in a different vehicle.
It is Pangkaeker’s version that these were the people who killed Tazne and dumped her body.
By the end of Pangkaeker’s account, where he claimed he too was the victim, he sat and strained his face as if on the verge of tears and said: “I just feel, what happened, I couldn’t help it.”
He testified earlier that he had followed Tazne into a minibus taxi with a driver and three passengers who wanted him to show them where “Malawi Camp” was.
On Wednesday he said he showed them to the informal settlement (in Elsies River) and they drove him past Parow to Paarl until they ended up in Worcester.
His lawyer advocate Saleem Halday asked him, while they were driving further and further away from Cape Town, if he was concerned about Tazne, to which he said, “I was worried and I wanted to know what was going through his mind and I asked where are you going to drop me off,” but the driver never answered him.
He said he was concerned about the girl getting home when they were dropped in Worcester and at this point he started looking for a lift because it was getting dark, until eventually they got a lift to a petrol station.
He said there he asked and asked but nobody was willing to offer assistance so they wandered the streets until they found a lit fire with nobody else around.
Pangkaeker went on to explain how they ended up in the back of a bakkie, which he claimed was driven by the same people that drove the minibus and tied him up. He claimed the little girl was also in the bakkie that drove to Worcester.
He claimed the people in the bakkie killed Tazne and put her into a pipe at the side of the road.
When Halday asked him why he didn’t report it to the police, he replied: “My mind was, I don’t know how to describe it but there was something wrong with my mind.
“I don’t know if I was afraid or thought everyone was going to blame me, so I started blaming myself because I don’t know what happened to Tazne and I can’t account to anyone.”