Prosecutor accuses Pistorius at end of questioning

Wrapping up five days of relentless cross-examination of Oscar Pistorius at his murder trial, the chief prosecutor insisted on Tuesday that he intentionally shot his girlfriend to death after they argued and in a final exchange urged the Olympic athlete to take responsibility for the Valentine’s Day killing.

“Who should we blame for the fact that you shot her?” prosecutor Gerrie Nel asked Mr. Pistorius. It came right at the end of Mr. Nel’s intense scrutiny of nearly every aspect of the double-amputee runner’s story that he killed Reeva Steenkamp last year after mistaking her for a dangerous intruder.

“I don’t know, my lady, I was scared,” Mr. Pistorius replied, his voice cracking slightly as he addressed the judge and maintained his argument that he shot through a toilet cubicle door in his home at a perceived intruder who he thought was about to attack him.

It’s a story the prosecutor dismissed as “improbable”.

Mr. Nel accused Mr. Pistorius, the one-time star of disabled sport, of tailoring evidence and concocting the version to cover up that he killed Steenkamp intentionally after a late night fight.

Mr. Pistorius steered away from a direct response to the prosecutor’s invitation to take the blame for Steenkamp’s killing, saying only that he opened fire because he believed his life was under threat. That remark drew barbed follow-up questions from Mr. Nel.

“We should blame somebody ... Should we blame Reeva?” asked Mr. Nel, who has harshly criticised Mr. Pistorius as someone who is unwilling to take responsibility for his actions.

“No, my lady,” Mr. Pistorius replied, addressing Judge Thokozile Masipa in line with court custom.

“She never told you she was going to the toilet,” Mr. Nel said. Then he asked, “Should we blame the government?”

When Mr. Pistorius responded with another reference to a perceived attacker in his toilet, Mr. Nel asked, “Who should we blame for the Black Talon rounds that ripped through her body?”

Mr. Nel said the court “will” find that Mr. Pistorius, 27, is lying and intentionally killed the 29-year-old model and rising reality TV star. That drew an objection from defence lawyer Barry Roux.

In the adjournment after his cross-examination, Mr. Pistorius rubbed his eyes and briefly sank his head onto the shoulder of a man who had been sitting with his family. He took a tissue from his sister Aimee, who squeezed his arm reassuringly. Shortly afterward, he listened attentively as Mr. Roux spoke to him in a low voice.

Mr. Nel asserted that the couple fought during the night of the shooting and Steenkamp wanted to leave, and then fled to the bathroom screaming before Mr. Pistorius shot her through the door with his 9 mm pistol. Mr. Pistorius said he never heard Steenkamp scream, or say anything in the minutes before he shot her.

The prosecutor even charged that Mr. Pistorius fired the four shots from about three metres away from Steenkamp as he was talking and arguing with Steenkamp, and changed his aim with later shots to ensure that he hit her as she fell back. Mr. Nel’s unrelenting questioning and accusations provoked many denials by Mr. Pistorius and caused the athlete to break down in sobs on numerous occasions.

“Unfortunately I have to put it to you that it’s getting more and more improbable,” Mr. Nel said to Mr. Pistorius of his story.

Mr. Pistorius struggled at times to explain alleged inconsistencies during his testimony and the Paralympic champion faces 25 years to life in prison if convicted of premeditated murder.

“I was terrified. I feared for my life. I was just scared,” Mr. Pistorius said. “I was thinking about what could happen to me, to Reeva. I was just extremely fearful.”

During cross-examination, Mr. Pistorius gave a sometimes muddled account of the shooting, saying he feared for his life but also didn’t intentionally shoot at anyone, prompting Mr. Nel to query if his defence was self-defence or “involuntary action”.

Mr. Pistorius also told Mr. Roux he didn’t consciously pull the trigger on his gun and said it happened “before I could think”.

Sobbing Pistorius describes shooting girlfriend

PRETORIA: A sobbing Oscar Pistorius described the moment he shot and killed his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp claiming he fired four shots "before I knew it", he told his murder trial on Tuesday.

The sprinter wept so uncontrollably as he recounted the events of the fateful night that it forced the adjournment of his trial until Wednesday.

Trembling and overwrought, the champion athlete described rushing and stumbling toward his bathroom with a gun in the dead of night on Valentine´s Day 2013 after hearing a suspected intruder.

"I was overcome with fear" he said, his voice cracking with anguish. "Before I knew it, I´d fired four shots at the door".

Pistorius faces a life sentence if found guilty of deliberately murdering Steenkamp, a charge he denies.

"My ears were ringing, I didn´t hear anything," Pistorius continued. He shouted for Steenkamp to phone the police, and rushed back into the room.

"I kept on shouting for Reeva." When she did not respond Pistorius said he realised he may have made a terrible mistake and rushed back to the bathroom to break down the door.

There, in a pool of blood, he found her fatally wounded, with gunshots to the hip, arm, hand and head.

"I sat over Reeva," the athlete testified crying loudly and putting his head in his hands and before letting out the barely intelligible cry, "she wasn´t breathing".

After a brief adjournment from the harrowing testimony, his lawyer Barry Roux came back to say his client was in no state to continue.

The case was adjourned until Wednesday.

- The moment ´everything changed´ -

Earlier, Pistorius had explained how the couple had gone to bed around 10pm after a quiet evening, but woke up to bring in two fans he had left outside to cool his bedroom.

At that point he knew Steenkamp was awake and they exchanged a few words.

"That´s the moment that everything changed," he said, after he heard the sound coming from the bathroom.

"The first thing that ran through my mind was that I needed to arm myself," he said under defence lawyer Barry Roux´s gentle coaxing.

"I wasn´t sure where to point the firearm. I had it pointed at the toilet but my eyes were going to the window and the toilet," he said.

"I wasn´t sure if someone was going to come out of the toilet attacking me," he said, his voice quavering.

His sister Aimee was crying softly with her head bowed, while Steenkamp´s mother June sat impassively in the public gallery.

- A future together -

Pistorius´s initial evidence has focused on countering the prosecution´s portrayal of him as reckless and obsessed with fast cars and guns.

He had begun his second day of testimony with a description of how he met the vivacious law graduate and how they quickly grew closer. He said they had begun to plan a future together.

"The first six days we knew each other we called each other every day," he said.

"I was very keen on Reeva," he said. "We started really seeing a future with each other." The star Paralympian was in tears as he read reams of transcribed cell phone messages he and Steenkamp sent each other during their four month relationship.

In one typical message the aspiring actress affectionately said "I love you, boo".

Pistorius also sought to explain text messages in which Steenkamp said she was frightened by his behaviour

."I´m scared of you sometimes and how you snap at me and how you will act towards me," Steenkamp said.

Pistorius said: "I just think it was a bad hour in our relationship," describing a fight at an engagement party.

He also issued a tearful apology to Steenkamp´s family."I can promise that when she went to bed that night she felt loved."

He is likely to remain on the stand most of the week as his extensive testimony is expected to be followed by gruelling and lengthy cross-examination by the prosecution.

Cape Town-based criminal advocate William Booth, who is not participating in the trial, said much will depend on how Pistorius holds up in that second phase.

"Oscar´s evidence can only be properly assessed once he´s been cross-examined," Booth said.

In the five weeks since the trial began, Pistorius has appeared fragile and sometimes annoyed, frequently crying in court.

He was physically sick when the gruesome details of Steenkamp´s death were discussed.

His lawyer Barry Roux said he will call up to 17 witnesses in his case to testify on ballistics, urine emptying, damage to the toilet door, sound, and "disability and vulnerability".

The trial is slated to run to at least mid-May.

‘Pistorius smashed toilet door with bat to reach wounded Reeva’

Oscar Pistorius was on his stumps when he smashed down a locked toilet door to reach his shot girlfriend, a South African police forensic expert said on Wednesday, countering the Paralympic star’s assertion he was wearing his prosthetic legs at the time.
Wielding the cricket bat in his hands, police colonel Johannes Vermuelen knelt down before swinging it at the wooden door in a court reconstruction to show the angle of the marks and to suggest they could only have been made by someone much shorter than him.
The 27-year-old double amputee is charged with the murder of model and law graduate Reeva Steenkamp, whom he shot through the locked toilet door on Valentine’s Day last year.
Prosecutors want to prove that it was premeditated killing, but Pistorius says he was defending himself from what he thought was an intruder who had broken into his gated-community home in the capital of the crime-ridden country.
At his bail hearing last year, Pistorius justified shooting because of the extreme vulnerability he felt because of his disability. However, in his affidavit he stated that he had put on his prostheses before smashing down the door.
Vermuelen disagreed. “The marks on the door are actually consistent with him not having his legs on and I suspect they must be similar to the height that he was when he fired the shots,” he told the court.