Criminal record returns to haunt robber

Werner Menges

Matheus Frans Tjappa

Tjappa (54) has a record of previous criminal convictions stretching back all the way to July 1975, Judge Nate Ndauendapo was informed with Tjappa’s return to court following the delivery of the verdict in his latest trial last week. Tjappa is due to be sentenced on Friday next week on the most recent charges on which he has been convicted.

The criminal justice system has been misunderstanding him since the time of his first conviction, Tjappa indicated to the judge when he informed him that he had been wrongly convicted time and again in the past in cases in which he was actually not guilty.

Tjappa’s latest conviction is his tenth.

Judge Ndauendapo found him guilty on a charge of robbery with aggravating circumstances, three counts of attempted murder, and charges of negligent discharge or handling of a firearm and possession of a firearm and ammunition without a license on Tuesday last week.

All of those charges emanated from an armed robbery in which a gang of men stole about N$42 600 from a branch of the supermarket group Woermann Brock in Windhoek’s Khomasdal area on the evening of 11 October 2008.

One of the members of the gang that carried out the robbery was left behind when his accomplices fled from the scene in a car. The remaining member of the gang tried to flee from the scene on foot and fired several shots at police officers who pursued him until he was wounded in the foot and cornered in a pipe in a riverbed nearby.

The person pulled from the pipe was Tjappa. A stolen revolver was also found in the pipe, while money was found on Tjappa’s person – some of it had been stuffed into his underpants – and two bags with more money were found close to the spot where he was caught, the judge heard during Tjappa’s trial.

The police’s record of Tjappa’s previous convictions indicates that he was found guilty of a crime for the first time in Windhoek in July 1975, when he was convicted of theft.

More convictions followed in 1980, when Tjappa was found guilty of theft, housebreaking and possession of housebreaking implements. He clocked up more convictions on charges of housebreaking with intent to steal and theft during the 1980s, when he was repeatedly sentenced to terms of imprisonment ranging from four months to three years.

Tjappa graduated to an even more serious level of criminality in August 1992, when he was found guilty in the High Court on three counts of robbery with aggravating circumstances, and sentenced to an effective 49 years’ imprisonment. That sentence was later cut to 20 years when he succeeded with an appeal to the Supreme Court.

In that case, Tjappa and two co-accused were convicted in connection with a spate of armed robberies, which had been committed at farms in the Omaruru, Otjiwarongo and Okahandja districts from December 1990 to March 1991.

Tjappa told Judge Ndauendapo yesterday that he served the 20-year prison term until he was released in November 2007.

Less than a year later he was arrested in connection with the Woermann Brock robbery.

“This is a man who spent a good part of his life behind bars,” Judge Ndauendapo commented while Tjappa’s defence lawyer, Mbushandje Ntinda, addressed him on the sentence to be imposed on Tjappa.

“I’m not sure he can be rehabilitated. Because that is one of the objectives of punishment,” the judge said. “If one looks at his track record, is he not a candidate who must actually be put away for the rest of his life?”

Ntinda conceded that it was inevitable that Tjappa should be sentenced to a term of imprisonment. He, however, asked the court to also show some mercy to his client.

State advocate Palmer Kumalo, arguing that Tjappa has shown that he was determined not to be stopped from committing crimes, asked the judge to sentence him to “a very lengthy” jail term.