Judge postpones case over Stoffels murder arrest

THE hearing of a case in which the government is being sued for N$2,7 million by the man formerly accused of having raped and murdered 17-year-old schoolgirl Magdalena Stoffels in Windhoek five years ago failed to get under way as planned in the Windhoek High Court yesterday.

The hearing of Fillipus’ case against government was scheduled to start before Acting Judge Kobus Miller yesterday, but ended up being postponed after the judge pointed out that the matter was not yet ripe to be heard because a pre-trial order, in which directions about the hearing of the case should be given in terms of the court rules, had not yet been issued.

Acting Judge Miller placed the case back on to his case management roll and postponed it to 5 November for a pre-trial hearing.

Fillipus (37) is suing the government for alleged wrongful arrest, wrongful detention, and malicious prosecution. He is claiming that the police had no reasonable grounds or suspicion on which they could base his arrest in Windhoek on 27 July 2010 – the day on which Stoffels was found fatally injured in a riverbed near Windhoek’s Dawid Bezuidenhout High School, where she was a student. Stoffels is suspected to have been raped after she was attacked while walking home from school.

Fillipus was arrested after he was found washing clothing, which was alleged to have had blood spots on it, in the same river where Stoffels had been attacked. He was arrested a few hundred metres from the spot where she had been found.

After Fillipus had been kept in police custody for nine and a half months, the charges against him were withdrawn in May 2011 on instructions from the prosecutor general. Prosecutor general Martha Imalwa subsequently said the charges were withdrawn because crucial forensic evidence in the case did not link Fillipus to the alleged rape and murder of Stoffels.

In his civil claim, Fillipus is contending that not only his arrest, but also his detention, had been wrongful and that the criminal proceedings instituted against him had been malicious.

He is also claiming that after the withdrawal of the charges police officers removed him from Windhoek and directed him to a place that was unknown to his lawyer, Titus Ipumbu, until January 2012.

In a plea filed at the High Court the government is denying that Fillipus’ arrest, detention and prosecution had been wrongful and unlawful. The police officer who arrested Fillipus had reasonable grounds to believe that he had committed the offences he was charged with, and after his first court appearance he was detained on the basis of lawful orders to that effect by a magistrate, it has been pleaded on behalf of the government.

The government is also arguing in its plea that Fillipus’ claims over his alleged unlawful arrest and detention have prescribed, since those claims were instituted more than a year after he had been arrested and detained. The Police Act requires that a civil claim against the police should be lodged within a year after a cause of action arose.

Senior counsel Gerson Hinda is representing the government on instructions from government lawyer Chipo Machaka. Ipumbu is representing Fillipus.

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