PRETORIA: South African track star Oscar Pistorius had a row with a policeman who picked up his gun after pulling over his friend for speeding, saying “You can’t just touch another man’s gun,” the friend told his murder trial yesterday.
Pistorius, a double amputee, is accused of murdering girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp on Valentine’s Day last year. He maintains he shot her through a locked toilet door believing an intruder was lurking in his luxury
Pretoria home.
His friend, Darren Fresco, told the court in Pretoria that he had been driving south of Johannesburg in September 2012 when Pistorius, nicknamed “Bladerunner” for his carbon fibre prosthetics, and his then girlfriend Samantha Taylor were flagged down.
“Another officer went over to the passenger seat where Oscar Pistorius was sitting and he picked up a gun. There was an altercation between the accused and the officer,” Fresco said.
“Pistorius said to the officer, ‘You can’t just touch another man’s gun,’” Fresco said. “Then they argued.”
After being allowed to leave, Pistorius “out of the blue” fired the gun through the open sunroof of the car, to the astonishment of Fresco, who was driving at the time. “Apologies for my language, but I asked him if he was mad,” Fresco told the court. “He just laughed.”
In another shooting incident, the 27-year-old Paralympic and Olympic star asked Fresco to take the rap on his behalf after discharging a firearm inside a packed Johannesburg restaurant.
“Being a friend I said I would, with pleasure,” the long-haired Fresco said.
Pistorius is facing separate gun charges for the two incidents, part of the prosecution’s attempts to paint Pistorius as a cocky, gun-obsessed hot-head who does not like to take responsibility for his actions. Of the four rounds he fired through the toilet door, three hit his girlfriend, a 29-year-old model. REUTERS
