Accused claim confessions in Joshlin case were obtained under duress

The three accused in the murder case of Joslin Smith.

3 minutes

Video recordings of statements made by two of the accused in the Joshlin Smith kidnapping and human trafficking trial took center stage in the Western Cape High Court this week.

Jacquen Appollis and Steveno Van Rhyn gave these statements between the 4th and 5th of March last year. They, however, contend that the statements were given under duress and that they were tortured by police into making the so-called confessions.

The pair, along with the child’s mother, are on trial in the High Court sitting in Saldanha Bay on the Cape West Coast.

Steveno Van Rhyn’s video statement was played this week regarding his involvement in the disappearance of Joshlin Smith. In his statement, Van Rhyn says he accompanied Appollis on the 19th of February to take Joshlin to the home of Makalimo on the instruction of Kelly Smith. He says they left the child there and that he did not see her again.

During his statement, Van Rhyn says he was not involved in Joshlin’s disappearance but returned to Makalimo to ask for his share of the money.

According to Jacquen Appollis’s statement, on the Sunday before the child went missing, Kelly Smith told him she was tired of Joshlin’s “grootmaak ma” and father wanting her to give them the child.

Appollis says the next day, the Monday when Smith came home for lunch, she told him to take Joshlin to Makalimo and that Makalimo would help with R20 000.

The court ruled that it must be published that Appollis claims that this part of his statement, where it deals with what happened to the child was not his own knowledge but came from another source.

The head of Serious and Violent Crimes in the Western Cape, Brigadier Leon Hanana, says he wasn’t surprised when he was informed that Appollis and van Rhyn wanted to make confessions. He told the court that he viewed this as progress in the case.

“When Lombard informed you that they wanted to confess, surely you would have had some questions about why all of a sudden now. My lord, if I received information about a confession, for me, that is progress in the investigation. And if a person wants to confess, he wants to speak the truth, I accept that because before the confession you have many choices to confess or not. Over a period of two weeks, all of a sudden, they want to confess. That’s the reason why I brought experienced detectives who work with these cases on a daily basis. And I had absolute trust in the team that I called to do this investigation,” says Hanana.