The cellphone records of the bodyguards of slain steroid king Brian Wainstein came under scrutiny at the Western Cape High Court on Tuesday at the trial of murder accused Mark Lifman and Jerome ‘Donkie’ Booysen.
After a week-long delay, Hawks Warrant Officer Mias Engelbrecht returned to court for cross-examination by defence teams as hundreds of files were scrutinised.
This follows the testimony of a former bodyguard of Wainstein who revealed that he, along with his brother who may not be named, had handed over their cellphones to the Hawks following their arrest.
It is believed that the cellphone files will provide evidence on what led up to to the 2019 murder of Wainstein.
The bodyguard has already told the court how he was introduced to Wainstein and stationed at his larney Constantia home to help keep him safe.
The man fingered various underworld dik dinge, including Lifman, Donkie and international fugitive Kishor ‘Kamal’ Naidoo as being behind Wainstein’s assassination.
In his testimony, the witness gave details of meetings and calls where the plans to murder Wainstein were discussed and even admitted to betraying his former boss by helping plan his murder and later taking over the steroid trade, although he failed in the latter.
Over the past two weeks, Engelbrecht has taken to the stand to explain how the cellphone files were downloaded and stored for the investigation.
The extraction reports shown at court list contacts, calls, recordings, images and videos from the cellphones of the bodyguards and were obtained using a data recovery software programme known as Cellebrite.
During his testimony, the bodyguard told the court that prior to his arrest he had downloaded a Call Recorder App amid calls from SARS and had kept the program on his phone.
While under cross examination by Advocate Amanda Nel, who represents Donkie and Andre Naude, questioned whether the application had recorded all the calls made through WhatsApp in addition to voice calls.
Nel highlighted that it was the defence’s understanding that the information obtained from the phones in the Hawks investigation was what data the bodyguards had decided to keep on their cellphones and not discard of.
Engelbrecht explained that he downloaded “everything that was humanly possible” from the devices as the instructions of the investigators were to extract all the information they could.
The trial continues.
Meanwhile, Donkie’s rival Nafiz Modack will also return to the Western Cape High Court on Thursday where a different Hawks team, who used the same Cellebrite software, will further outline their findings against Modack’s co-accused, Zane Kilian.