Nat Molomo
MASERU — A woman who sued the Commissioner of Correctional Service after she was denied the right to visit her jailed brother at Maseru Central Prison has withdrawn the application after she was granted access to her brother. Nteboheleng Sekonyela moved the application in the High Court on July 13 after the prison authorities denied her the right to visit Chief Sekonyela who is serving a 20-year sentence for murder.
Her lawyer, Sello Tšabeha, was aloso barred from seeing Sekonyela.
The incident happened after prison warders embarked on a strike demanding a salary raise last month.
The strike triggered pandemonium at the prison that saw at least 13 prisoners and two prison warders being injured. Sekonyela was among the prisoners who are said to have been injured in the fracas and was taken to Queen ’Mamohato Memorial Hospital where he was treated as an outpatient.
His sister told the court in an affidavit that she was given an impression that her brother had been beaten up severely during the commotion which forced the prison authorities to bar her and her lawyer from seeing him. However, she withdrew the application at the High Court last week after the prison authorities restored Sekonyela’s visitation rights.
Justice Lebohang Molete was supposed to hear the case on July 16 when crown counsel, Advocate Leokaoke, informed him that the case had been overtaken by events as the visitation rights had been restored.
The judgment, Leokaoke said, would be academic. Tšabeha told the Sunday Express on Friday that Nteboheleng had already been given permission to visit her brother in prison adding continuing with the case would not serve any purpose.
“I went to prison to check and I met the second applicant (Sekonyela),” Tšabeha, said. Sekonyela was convicted last year for the murder of his mother, ’Makatleho Sekonyela, in 2006 near Thabong in Qoaling in Maseru. High Court judge Justice Nthomeng Majara found that ’Makatleho and one of her daughters had just boarded a vehicle and were about to leave for Ha-’Majane where she ran a shop and a liquor restaurant.
’Makatleho was a widowed businesswoman.
After she had closed the passenger door, Sekonyela appeared from among the scraps in the family yard, approached the vehicle and shot at his mother through the passenger window and the front windscreen.
He fired three shots and immediately fled the premises. Two days later he was accompanied by his maternal uncle to the Pitso Ground police where he handed himself and surrendered his gun.
The court found that he used a Brenneke shot gun to commit the murder. Meanwhile, in a separate case 65-year-old Moroke Morobe, a national training commissioner with the Lesotho Scouts Association, was remanded to appear in court on August 7 to answer charges of sexual harassment. Morobe allegedly sexually fondled a 17-year-old girl who is a member of the association at St Michael’s in Ha-Maama on July 4.