Kotze's parents and sister, who have attended every day of the trial of the man accused of shooting Kotze in a flat at Grootfontein on October 2 2002, were also present shortly before 13h00 on Friday to hear Judge Sylvester Mainga acquit Dewald Ludeke on all charges.

Ludeke (29) was pronounced not guilty of murder and alternative charges of failing to safeguard a firearm and handling a firearm while under the influence of alcohol in a case that proceedings showed was seriously flawed.

While it was a turn of events that left Kotze's family crestfallen, they indicated that Judge Mainga's ruling vindicated an opinion that they had held since they heard the news that Kotze had died from a gunshot wound to the head in Ludeke's flat during the early morning hours of October 2 2002 - that the case had been poorly investigated from the start.

Dissatisfied with the initial Police investigation - the family was informed, to its dismay and disbelief, that the Police were treating Kotze's death at the age of 27 as a suicide - they kept up pressure for a more thorough investigation.

They refused to believe that his shooting was suicide.

In announcing his ruling on Friday, Judge Mainga commented that the case had been "badly, badly investigated".

Kozonguizi agreed with that when Judge Mainga asked him if he would concede that the matter had been badly investigated in the beginning.

Everything in the case could have been different if one test had been done properly from the outset, defence counsel Rudi Cohrssen, likewise told the Judge.

That missing first step would have been proper gunpowder-residue tests on both Kotze's and Ludeke's hands as soon as possible after the shooting, to determine on whose hands traces of gunpowder could be found, as an indication of who had fired the pistol with which Kotze was shot.

Ludeke's hands were never tested.

Test samples were taken from Kotze's hands only after his body had been moved to a mortuary while wrapped in a duvet, which might have rubbed off signs of gunpowder from his hand.

Kozonguizi tried to salvage the prosecution's case by presenting the evidence of the former Detective Chief Inspector Nelius Becker, an ace detective who took over the investigation of the case in August 2003, on Friday, but to no avail.

Becker listed a series of mistakes that he thought had been made with the initial investigation.

Over the objections of Cohrssen, he told the court that in his opinion the physical evidence found at the scene after the shooting did not fit in with either the scenario of a suicide or an accidental shooting at Kotze's own hands.

"It appears that this person was sitting in a relaxed position.

In fact, it appears that he was sitting in a sleeping position," Becker told the court while looking at photographs that one of the first Police officers at the scene took of Kotze's body on a sofa where he had been fatally shot.

According to Becker, the biggest mistake made in the early part of the investigation was that the first Police officers at the scene appeared to have jumped to conclusions by quickly deciding that they were dealing with a suicide.

They should first have done an investigation before reaching conclusions, he said.

Becker listed a series of unexplained factors that still bothered him.

One was the way that Ludeke was said to have first reported that Kotze had been shot.

The court heard that Ludeke had the pistol with which Kotze was shot - the gun belonged to Ludeke - tucked into the waistband of his pants when he roused people asleep in the house adjacent to his flat to alert them that Kotze had shot himself.

It was found that there was no cartridge in the chamber of the pistol at that stage.

According to Becker, that must have meant that after finding that Kotze had in some way shot himself - Ludeke said he made that discovery after visiting the toilet in his flat - Ludeke must have picked up the pistol from where he said it was lying on the floor, taken out the magazine, cocked it to remove the cartridge from the chamber in order to make the firearm safe, put that cartridge back into the magazine, released the gun's hammer again, put the magazine back in the firearm, and then tucked it into his waistband before he ran to the house.

Such actions, from a man who had just made the shocking discovery of a friend who had supposedly shot himself, raised a lot of questions, Becker indicated.

It might be questionable, but the suspicions still fell short of proving guilt on Ludeke's part, or of requiring him to give further explanations to the court, the ruling shows, however.

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