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A MAN accused of breaking into the plush King William’s Town home of SA Ambassador to Greece Mandisa Marasha was found not guilty of raping three woman in the house – after it emerged police showed them a photo of the accused immediately before an identity parade.

Unathi Bhe, 25, was convicted of four counts of theft and housebreaking with intent to steal after he broke into Marasha’s double-storey King William’s Town home three times over a period of a few months last year while Marasha was abroad.

He was also found guilty of breaking into a storeroom at the Berlin Hotel and stealing a case of beer.

Acting judge Glenn Goosen lambasted the police for their poor investigation in the case , saying they had done a “disservice” to the victims.

The State alleged that in April he broke into Marasha’s home, where two women, a teenager and other children were sleeping, and that he had repeatedly raped three of them over a number of hours.

But Goosen said the State’s case was founded solely on the identification of Bhe by two of the women. “No other objective evidence linking the accused to the commission of the offences was tendered by the State.”

There was no evidence that police had attempted to lift fingerprints from the scene or that any other forensic investigation was undertaken.

And the identification parade held in May last year was tainted by police officials who had, immediately before the parade, shown a photograph of Bhe to the two women.

Goosen said it was “difficult to conceive of any reason” why a photograph of Bhe would be presented to the two women immediately prior to the identification parade “other than to facilitate his identification at that parade”. To make matters worse, the brother of another woman who said Bhe had attempted to rape her during a break-in at the same house in May, had been given the opportunity to take a photo of Bhe using his cellphone at the police station where Bhe was being detained.

Goosen said a court must be satisfied that an identification was obtained in a manner which excluded the possibility that the procedure was unfair or that the identifying witness was influenced in any way in making the identification.

He said he could therefore not find that the identification of Bhe at the parade was reliable. He said the State’s failure to prove its case was “directly as a result of a gross irregularity in the manner in which the identification parade was conducted”.

He said the public was entitled to expect the police to carry out their obligations diligently and efficiently.

“Victims of criminal conduct, too, are entitled to expect that the crimes perpetrated against them are properly investigated and that these are diligently prosecuted.”

He said justice must “speak to both victim and perpetrator”.

“In this instance, the standard of investigation had patently failed to meet this basic obligation and, in the process, a disservice had been done to the victims of the crime.”

Bhe was sentenced to an effective six years’ imprisonment for the four counts of housebreaking with intent to steal and theft.

Goosen said housebreaking with the intention to steal and theft was a “particularly serious scourge” in communities, especially where the criminal entered a home in the dead of night while its occupants were “asleep and at their most vulnerable”.

This struck at the “very heart of an individual’s personal security”. - By ADRIENNE CARLISLE