Cwele wants court to accept her testimony - Times LIVE

Cwele's advocate, Mvuseni Ngubane, released a fresh defence yesterday when he told the Pietermaritzburg Great Court, sitting during the KwaZulu-Natal coastal city of Ramsgate, that Tessa Beetge, the woman Cwele allegedly recruited being a drugs mule, was no angel.
He was referring to an e-mail through which Beetge asked Cwele if she would falsely claim that they worked together on the Hibiscus Coast Municipality.
"Tessa did not testify and the absence of her evidence leaves a yawning gap in the state's case," said Ngubane.
"She appears to have made friends overseas. As things stand, we do not know what those friends were up to. Did they deal in drugs in cahoots with her? Did they use her as being a drug mule and put medication in her bag without [her] knowing?
"We are left to speculate about these things inside absence of evidence by Tessa."
The state alleges that Cwele and co-accused Frank Nabolisa recruited Beetge and Charmaine Moss as medicines mules. Beetge is serving an eight-year jail sentence in Brazil after 10kg of cocaine was found in her luggage in 2008.
Over the next seven weeks, Judge Piet Koen will deliberate on Cwele's defence that she was merely a generous friend who was helping two desperate women.
The defence wants the court to accept an affidavit during which Cwele claims Nabolisa owned a construction firm and needed white women to work with him so that he could secure contracts from whites.
Koen said that he would deliver his judg ment on May 4 in Pietermaritzburg: "You won't have to come to Ramsgate again. Pietermaritzburg is a little bit further but I am sure you will make it there," he said.
Earlier, Cwele whispered to Nabolisa within the dock when prosecutor Ian Cooke said the transcripts of cellphone calls and SMSs between them and Beetge were an "overwhelming web from which the two accused cannot escape".
"The way in which the evidence all fits collectively, like a hand in a glove, completely excludes there becoming a possibility that the data was corrupted in any way," he said.
But Ngubane argued that the state had not proved the reliability of the recordings and transcripts.