The Judge President yesterday asked Public Prosecutor Frieda Kishi and defence counsel Christie Mostert to prepare themselves to address the High Court in Windhoek on the issue of life imprisonment today.

Kishi has asked him to impose the maximum possible sentence on Joseph Simon Kanghondi (30), who was convicted of arson and murder yesterday.

Kanghondi's is the first case in years in which the High Court has been asked to hand down a life prison term.

In recent years, the court has appeared to prefer handing down prison terms of which the length has been determined.

These have ranged from as much as an effective 75 years' imprisonment for a duo convicted of a double murder and robbery in 2001, and a 69-year term that the confessed killer of a family of four also received in 2001, to a 45-year term for a double murder earlier this year and 30 years given in 2001 to a man who stabbed his girlfriend to death in an unusually bloody knife attack.

The Judge President convicted Kanghondi of murdering his girlfriend and the mother of his two children, Maria Nghilokelwa Andreas (24), and of destroying the homestead of her mother, Ndeutala Kuliwaye, at the village of Okakelo in the Oshakati district through arson on October 19 2000.

Andreas was seriously injured when Kanghondi attacked her with a panga, slashing off some of her fingers and further injuring her to such an extent that her left hand and right leg had to be amputated.

She survived both the machete attack and the serious burn wounds she suffered when Kanghondi packed grass on top of her and set it on fire, but eventually died in hospital in Windhoek after clinging to life for some four months.

According to testimony heard during Kanghondi's trial, he claimed after the attack that he had acted out of anger as Andreas allegedly told him that one of the two children he thought he had fathered with her was in fact another man's child.

The charge-sheet setting out the indictment against Kanghondi wrongly gave Andreas's date of death as January 23 2001, the Judge President noted in his judgement.

He made a finding, based on testimony by Kuliwaye and the medical doctor who performed a post-mortem on Andreas, that she passed away on February 28 2001, and that her death was the result of the injuries she sustained in the attack.

The Judge President rejected Kanghondi's claim that he has no recollection whatsoever of the events during which Andreas was attacked and injured with eventual fatal results.

This claim of amnesia was not borne out by medical evidence, and in any event was, in terms of Namibian law, not considered to be a defence to criminal charges, Judge President Shivute stated.

He commented that it was evident that Kanghondi had acted "voluntarily and consciously" on October 19 2000, "before, during and after the incident".

Kanghondi remains in custody, where he has been kept since the day of the attack on Andreas.

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