LATEST NEWS ON DEWANI MURDER

Wallflower wrote:Shrien Dewani's family have released footage of their wedding to show how much in love they were.

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/5/20101219/tuk-honeymoon-murder-dewanis-in-wedding-45dbed5.html

Oh FFS! Why doesn't the Government just bring in a new law that says anybody who can afford PR managers and top lawyers should never be accountable for anything ....... and have done with it!

It would make life so much more simple if we knew that it was on statute that there really is a Them and Us. Then we wouldn't keep feeling this deep sense of justice every time we see somebody getting away with things that the ordinary man in the street would never get away with. We could just sit back and say Oh look! Yet another woman murdered by her husband this morning, but it's alright coz he is a businessman ..... or ..... Oh Look! Another child has gone and disappeared from their bed again. No need to worry though, coz the parents are not on social security, they tax their car , and they always keep their front garden tidy. No need for the police to go getting involved and framing them.

FFS!

Oh Midas I shrieked when i read your post and yes its so true. People get paid lots of money from newspapers who alledged they did this and that and yet those same newspapers willingly accept PR press releases which put positive spin on those apparently involved or connected in some way to awful crimes. Im all for freedom of free speech, but lets have it for everyone and not just a few who pay enormous sums of money for the right of free speech and spin, nd lets have some balanced reporting jimo

tanszi ........ I do a lot of shrieking ....... especially when I see the hapless holiday-making pair invading our space with lines in the neswpapers about being heart-broken, and telling the world that somebody knows something about what happened to Madeleine and that the somebody is just as bad as the person who took her. I think it's hysteria ....... borne out a complete impotency to do anything about it.

Latest on Sky News.......the video clip of them dancing didn"t come out.I suppose there is a way of including it, but I don"t know how.


Pictures of Anni and Shrien Dewani dancing at their wedding have been released by his family, as he remains a suspect in her murder.
His relatives claim he has been torn apart by what they call "ridiculous" allegations that he plotted to kill his wife on their honeymoon.

Mrs Dewani was killed in an apparent carjacking in a South African township, but her husband was freed by the attackers.

The suspect's legal team is gathering evidence to try to block South Africa's attempts to extradite him.

Mr Dewani's family and supporters say he has been made a scapegoat by authorities who are anxious to protect the country's tourism industry.

They have described the police case against him as "flimsy" and "flawed".

Speaking to The Independent newspaper, a close relative said: "Shrien is torn apart by it all.

"He has been robbed of the love of his life and is grieving."



Friends say the couple were very much in love



The main evidence against the Briton appears to be a signed confession from taxi driver Zola Tongo, who received a reduced jail term of 18 years after striking a plea bargain.

He has accused Mr Dewani of arranging the murder of his 28-year-old, Swedish-born wife on November 13.

Care home owner Mr Dewani, 30, believes the murder allegations are based on evidence from men "who have everything to win and nothing to lose from inventing a story", his supporters say.

They also point to claims by a lawyer acting for the two men accused of the murder that his clients were "tortured by police" before signing confessions.

In the video of the Dewanis' Hindu wedding ceremony, they are seen singing Bollywood love film lyrics to each other.

Close friends described the couple as "madly in love" to the point of it being "sickening and embarrassing".

And although they had arguments, they dealt with them maturely, it was said.

Friends also said the couple chose South Africa as a wedding destination because neither had been before and it matched their initials - SA.

Oh, what a co-incidence! Just like the yellow-and-green colour theme just so happens to also be the colours of The Celtic Football Club.

The Famous Grouse wrote:Oh, what a co-incidence! Just like the yellow-and-green colour theme just so happens to also be the colours of The Celtic Football Club.

Mon the hoops!

Woops! That just came over me somehow!

So, because Dewani can do a stylized dance and knows all the words to a sickly sentimental Bollywood song, we are to accept that this proves he was madly in love and that he could not have arranged the murder of his wife! Right!

AnnaEsse wrote:So, because Dewani can do a stylized dance and knows all the words to a sickly sentimental Bollywood song, we are to accept that this proves he was madly in love and that he could not have arranged the murder of his wife! Right!

That is about the sum of it, not only have journalist skills been dumbed down but so has policing!

Panda wrote:
Latest on Sky News.......the video clip of them dancing didn"t come out.I suppose there is a way of including it, but I don"t know how.


Pictures of Anni and Shrien Dewani dancing at their wedding have been released by his family, as he remains a suspect in her murder.
His relatives claim he has been torn apart by what they call "ridiculous" allegations that he plotted to kill his wife on their honeymoon.

Mrs Dewani was killed in an apparent carjacking in a South African township, but her husband was freed by the attackers.

The suspect's legal team is gathering evidence to try to block South Africa's attempts to extradite him.

Mr Dewani's family and supporters say he has been made a scapegoat by authorities who are anxious to protect the country's tourism industry.

They have described the police case against him as "flimsy" and "flawed".

Speaking to The Independent newspaper, a close relative said: "Shrien is torn apart by it all.

"He has been robbed of the love of his life and is grieving."



Friends say the couple were very much in love



The main evidence against the Briton appears to be a signed confession from taxi driver Zola Tongo, who received a reduced jail term of 18 years after striking a plea bargain.

He has accused Mr Dewani of arranging the murder of his 28-year-old, Swedish-born wife on November 13.

Care home owner Mr Dewani, 30, believes the murder allegations are based on evidence from men "who have everything to win and nothing to lose from inventing a story", his supporters say.

They also point to claims by a lawyer acting for the two men accused of the murder that his clients were "tortured by police" before signing confessions.

In the video of the Dewanis' Hindu wedding ceremony, they are seen singing Bollywood love film lyrics to each other.

Close friends described the couple as "madly in love" to the point of it being "sickening and embarrassing".

And although they had arguments, they dealt with them maturely, it was said.

Friends also said the couple chose South Africa as a wedding destination because neither had been before and it matched their initials - SA.

Trouble is, while all of this may very well be true, I find I'm less inclined to believe it because it's being played out in national newspapers through the words of anonymous "friends", orchestrated by a man whose national reputation is as a purveyor of kiss-and-tell stories by slappers to the rich and famous. If the case is as flimsy as we are being told, Dewani's top-flight lawyers will be able to dismantle it in no time at all, he will walk free and the South African police will look like idiots. Dewani will be cleared and will spend the rest of his life as a man who was wronged but whose integrity is in no doubt.
All this desperate spinning smacks of trying to evade justice. If I was innocent, I simply wouldn't want that cloud of suspicion hanging over me.

There is a rumour going around that there is a couple in Rothley doing dancing lessons.

SteveT wrote:There is a rumour going around that there is a couple in Rothley doing dancing lessons.

Is this the same couple who've ordered a stackload of Bollywood movies and soundtracks to find their very own love song??

Margaret,

They are probably the ones. Doing the quick step this morning.

That whole report sounds as if it's a staff reporter regurgitating an account put out by a PR person. I doubt that there's actually any 'journalism' involved in it at all.

Popcorn wrote:Trouble is, while all of this may very well be true, I find I'm less inclined to believe it because it's being played out in national newspapers through the words of anonymous "friends", orchestrated by a man whose national reputation is as a purveyor of kiss-and-tell stories by slappers to the rich and famous. If the case is as flimsy as we are being told, Dewani's top-flight lawyers will be able to dismantle it in no time at all, he will walk free and the South African police will look like idiots. Dewani will be cleared and will spend the rest of his life as a man who was wronged but whose integrity is in no doubt.
All this desperate spinning smacks of trying to evade justice. If I was innocent, I simply wouldn't want that cloud of suspicion hanging over me.

Yes, I agree with you - I always say if someone has nothing to hide they've nothing to fear. I'd find it much easier to believe in Mr Dewani's total innocence if he'd go back voluntarily to S Africa and face his accusers, ask them to show the evidence against him, prove that he was involved. If they can't do this, he will (as you say) walk free, he'll be vindicated, everyone will know he's innocent. Surely this would be a much simpler way to demonstrate innocence that hiring a PR 'reputation-protector' type of person and releasing videos of him dancing with his wife? How can anyone's innocence or guilt be determined by anything other than normal legal process? What has this poor woman's murder turned into - Strictly Come Dancing?

Same with the McCanns, of course. If instead of producing Clarence Mitchell like a rabbit out of a hat every time they need a bit of favourable publicity they'd simply offer to go back with all their holiday friends for a full police reconstruction and Kate offer to answer the 48 questions, it would at least show some willingness to take the disappearance of their daughter seriously. Are people honestly supposed to think that anyone who stops full cooperation with the police in the case of a vanished child really cares about that child? Surely if they wanted to find out what happened to Madeleine they'd have cooperated with the police, both Portuguese and British, in every possible way; they'd have begged the police to ask them every question they could think of, they'd have offered to hand over such things as Madeleine's medical records, their own financial details, the phone calls they made and text messages sent and received, anything and everything else the police might have wanted. Total transparency about every detail of their lives and Madeleine's life - wouldn't they have wanted the police to know everything, just in case something might have been important?

Non - or limited - cooperation with the police in a criminal case instinctively raises doubts. As indeed does wholesale condemnation of whatever police force just happens to be doing the investigation, even more so when allegations about suspects being framed by the police begin to surface. Funny how the police are always said to be doing a sterling job until they start showing suspicion towards family members, then suddenly it's the police who're in the firing line, the police who're accused of incompetence or worse.

All IMO.

Very good article from today's edition of SA's premier daily newspaper:

Race, class and the Dewani case
IMRAAN BUCCUS - Dec 21 2010 14:11

The Anni Dewani case has gripped the nation and created a media frenzy. Of course we can't come to any final conclusions until all the allegations and counter-allegations have been tested in court. But, though there may yet be surprises, on the basis of the information currently in the public domain, it certainly seems the police have a strong case against her husband, Shrien Dewani.

Still not clear is how an educated Swedish woman became so docile, not being party to any decision about the trip. Should we include in the dynamic the idea that she was not as docile as her husband would have liked and this contributed to her being murdered?

This case tells us a lot about our society and our world. For a start, if Shrien is guilty, this murder would be a transnational version of the various American murders in which white people drive to a black neighbourhood and shoot their wives on the assumption that the police and the public automatically assume black men must be responsible. Racism is also present in the way in which some of the British media have responded to the case, assuming South African police to be incompetent and that an upstanding British subject such as Shrien couldn't possibly have planned such a diabolical act.

If he is guilty, we have every right to be furious that he thought he could cover up such a heinous crime by making sure that it happened in Gugulethu -- racism would be an alibi. But there is also the absolutely shocking reality that there have been 700 murders in the past five years in Gugulethu. In addition, a high number of women are murdered and raped in Gugelethu and other townships and this is often not reported.

Here class enters the story. If there had been 700 murders in the past five years in Umhlanga Rocks or Sandton, the media and civil society would be up in arms. But in a class society, our lives don't count equally and Gugulethu murders pass without much response. This is one aspect of what the brilliant Hungarian scholar Anna Selmeczi has called the "social abandonment of the poor" in South Africa. The unequal state of education systems, the persistence of informal settlements and so on are other symptoms of this broader malaise.

By treating some lives as less valuable than others we have, as a nation, made ourselves vulnerable to the racism of the British media and, perhaps, Shrien too. The fact that one suspect has alleged police torture (increasingly normalised in post-apartheid South Africa in both criminal and political cases) has hardly helped our standing as a democracy.

Class also enters this story in that although there were moments during the struggle, especially in the days of the United Democratic Front, where many people took equality seriously, we have very quickly collapsed back into a rather extreme version of the sort of class society that equates money with virtue.

But you don't have to look for people eating sushi off naked women to find this conflation of wealth and virtue. It is endemic in civil society, where it is routinely assumed that middle-class activists will enlighten the unwashed masses. It's also common in the media where the virtue of middle-class people is often assumed while that of poor people, especially poor black people, has to be proved over and over again.

Rich and Poor irrational prejudices in our society

The shock that some people have shown at the idea that a rich man could be a killer and the resignation that some people have shown at the idea that ordinary residents of Gugulethu could be killers indicate how deeply these irrational prejudices have infected our society.
Although rates of some crimes are higher in poor communities this is simply a result of a lack of economic opportunities there. Rich people in the same situation would make similar choices. Moreover, even though rates of crime are high in places such as Gugulethu, most people in such places would never dream of committing a crime and are, despite their difficult circumstances, entirely decent.

Until we can separate our fear of crime, which is just one manifestation of our deeper fear of evil, from our prejudices around race and class, our thinking about the reality of human evil will continue to be infected by irrational prejudice. The reality is that you can be rich and British and yet be deeply evil. You can also be poor and African and be an entirely decent human being.

If we were without prejudice, every murder in Gugulethu would get the same attention as Anni Dewani's tragic death. But that is a world apart from the reality of our society. We have a long way to go before we can call this society just or decent.


Imraan Buccus is research fellow in the school of politics at the University of KwaZulu-Natal


http://www.mg.co.za/article/2010-12-21-race-class-and-the-dewani-case

The reality is that you can be rich and British and yet be deeply evil.

I think he read my mind on that score.

docmac wrote:The reality is that you can be rich and British and yet be deeply evil.

I think he read my mind on that score.

But not if you have a PR. PRs have a way of knowing instantly whether or not somebody is evil, and they would never represent anyone who was. That is why it is safe for newspapers to report the assertions of PRs prior to a trial as though they are facts.

Popcorn wrote:

docmac wrote:The reality is that you can be rich and British and yet be deeply evil.

I think he read my mind on that score.

But not if you have a PR. PRs have a way of knowing instantly whether or not somebody is evil, and they would never represent anyone who was. That is why it is safe for newspapers to report the assertions of PRs prior to a trial as though they are facts.

Max Clifford swears blind that OJ Simpson did not kill his ex wife Nicole and her friend ..... I kid you not!

pennylane wrote:

Popcorn wrote:

docmac wrote:The reality is that you can be rich and British and yet be deeply evil.

I think he read my mind on that score.

But not if you have a PR. PRs have a way of knowing instantly whether or not somebody is evil, and they would never represent anyone who was. That is why it is safe for newspapers to report the assertions of PRs prior to a trial as though they are facts.

Max Clifford swears blind that OJ Simpson did not kill his ex wife Nicole and her friend ..... I kid you not!

Really?!
I didn't know that. Credulity is clearly an important quality in a PR.

Popcorn wrote:

docmac wrote:The reality is that you can be rich and British and yet be deeply evil.

I think he read my mind on that score.

But not if you have a PR. PRs have a way of knowing instantly whether or not somebody is evil, and they would never represent anyone who was. That is why it is safe for newspapers to report the assertions of PRs prior to a trial as though they are facts.

Not sure about that, why does Pinky hang onto the Mcs? Because they pay well (or did do, imo) PR's are just a shield between the press and the payer they'll say anything.

Popcorn wrote:

docmac wrote:The reality is that you can be rich and British and yet be deeply evil.

I think he read my mind on that score.

But not if you have a PR. PRs have a way of knowing instantly whether or not somebody is evil, and they would never represent anyone who was. That is why it is safe for newspapers to report the assertions of PRs prior to a trial as though they are facts.

But only where the crime has been committed outside the UK und therefore within a foreign jurisdiction. Then it seems 'anything goes' - which is pure racism as described in the article docmac posted. But then the rent-a-gobs such as Mitchell or Clifford have clearly demonstrated that they are not only racist, but in referring to a section of society which openly disagrees with them as scum, racist with fascist overtones in the tradition of the most insidious practitioner of their disreputable craft. That I presume is why they are happy to work with suspected murderers. In fact in Clifford's case, he's been sniffing around the dogsh*t of the McCann case for the last three years and now finally found his own piece to make him the centre of attention; they just love to strut their stuff. High time the British government put a stop to it by bringing in legislation to regulate the reporting of international crime. After all the reporting of domestic crime is strictly controlled by the police and the courts, so where British subjects are involved in the investigation into a crime in a foreign country by a foreign police force, there is no reason why the same standards should not apply. It just isn't acceptable to have PR campaigns mounted by suspect(s) in a crime, irrespective of where it was committed.

I agree that the role of PR people, media spokesmen, reputation protectors, whatever name they wish to call themselves, is more than distasteful when a serious crime has been committed and someone has, for apparently good reason to the investigating police force, fallen under official suspicion. For anyone to start a publicity campaign on behalf of the suspect, without knowing whether or not he/she might have been involved in the crime, is patently wrong and shouldn't be allowed. Surely these attempts at influencing public opinion could be seen as attempting to influence the courts in such matters as bail, extradition, etc.?

IMO the media should not be allowed to give a one-sided view of any serious crime or any of the people concerned, including suspects. We've seen an utterly ridiculous situation where the Madeleine case is concerned, where three and a half years of biased reporting means that the majority of people in the UK, especially those not on the Internet, have absolutely no idea of what's in the official files, what's in Dr Amaral's book, what's in the rogatory interviews, the many contradictions and inconsistencies, etc. This isn't acceptable, but this is the reality of the situation, and is largely down to Clarence Mitchell and his seeming hold on the British media. Why do the newspapers listen to him? Mitchell wasn't in Praia da Luz when Madeleine disappeared (AFAWK) so how can he speak with any authority about her disappearance? He didn't know the McCanns prior to May 2007 so how can he know how much they are to be believed about anything? Same with Max Clifford - how can he speak with any authority about Shrien Dewani, his character or Anni Dewani's murder?

Let these PR people stick to what they used to do, ie get publicity for celebrities whose careers often depend on it, and leave the serious business of crime to the police and the legal profession.

Great post Dimsie. Rep point from me. What infuriated me was the fact the McCanns conducted their own investigation, with the media printing their version of events and even issuing pictures of their suspects. How on earth was this allowed. Media people should simply not be permitted to speak on behalf of people that may be suspected of possibly being involved in serious crime. Spin doctors aren't detectives. How can they decide whether their clients are innocent or guilty. Totally and absolutely wrong.

dimsie,
a brilliant post!
a rep from me too..

The SAs have now lodged a formal extradition request and Dewani will face trial in SA.

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/3316030/Dewani-to-face-trial-in-S-Africa.html

I think Chris posted something similar on another thread, but I am repeating it here in case anybody missed it.