Kalola (32) was first employed with a security company at Okahandja in 2002, and was still working as a security officer until his arrest on February 23 2005, a week after a resident of Okahandja had been found strangled in his home at the town.

Kalola's defence lawyer, Profysen Muluti, told Magistrate Dinnah Usiku this yesterday when he addressed the court on the sentences that were about to be imposed on Kalola on the two charges on which he had been convicted.

Magistrate Usiku went on to sentence Kalola to an effective jail term of 11 years and eight months.

With Kalola having been in custody for almost three and a half years, the effect of the sentence is that he could ultimately spend 15 years behind bars for the crimes he committed at Okahandja on February 16 2005.

On the afternoon of that day, the body of Carl Aron Carstens, a 41-year-old resident of Okahandja, was found in the bathroom of the house where he lived with his brother.

Carstens, who lived as a woman, was wearing a red dress and female underclothing when he was found dead.

A piece of electric cable with which he had been strangled was still coiled around his neck when his body was discovered.

Kalola pleaded guilty to a charge of murder, but not guilty to a second charge of robbery with aggravating circumstances, at the start of his trial in November last year.

He however admitted that he had taken a range of items from Carstens's house - including a cellphone, a video cassette recorder, jewellery and cosmetics - without permission from Carstens.

Magistrate Usiku acquitted Kalola of robbery, but convicted him of theft, on the second charge on Monday.

During the trial the only motive for the murder that was offered by defence lawyer Muluti was a claim that Kalola had a relationship with Carstens and that he killed Carstens because the latter wanted to commit a sexual act with him, and not in order to rob Carstens.

Muluti told the court yesterday that Kalola was expressing regret over his actions and was asking for forgiveness from the family of Carstens, the court and society.

Public Prosecutor Karin Esterhuizen commented to the Magistrate that Kalola was guilty of "callous criminal conduct", and that he had committed a grisly killing.

With the sentencing Magistrate Usiku told Kalola that photographs of the crime scene showed the ghastly nature of the crime he had committed.

Remarking that courts have been criticised by the community, which feels it is left at the mercy of dangerous criminals, as not imposing deterrent sentences, she told Kalola that the sentences the court was going to impose had to give effect to the aims of deterrence.

She also reminded him that he had been employed at the time he committed the crimes, and that he therefore should blame himself for the crimes he committed.

On the murder charge, Magistrate Usiku sentenced Kalola to 13 years' imprisonment, of which two years were suspended for a period of five years on condition that Kalola is not convicted of a crime of which violence against another person is an element.

She further sentenced him to eight months' imprisonment on the theft charge, and ordered that this sentence has to be served consecutively to the sentence on the murder charge.

* A report on Kalola's conviction of theft that was published in The Namibian yesterday may have created the impression that the Magistrate had said that robbery could only be committed against a living person.

She did not say so, but noted that none of the witnesses who testified in Kalola's trial could tell the court whether Kalola had removed items from Carstens's house before or after Carstens had been killed.

She also noted that robbery is defined as theft which is accompanied by actual or threatened violence against a person, which is aimed at overcoming or preventing resistance from the person.

It is also a notorious fact that a dead person cannot offer resistance, she noted when she found that Kalola's explanation that he had not used violence against Carstens in order to rob him could reasonably be true.

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