Ex-magistrate re-arrested ‘correctly’ after short-lived freedom

Arrested, released and then re-arrested. This was the course of events between last week Friday and yesterday for former magistrate Walter "Rooies" Mostert who had to appear in court twice yesterday after the state bungled the process.He appeared twice in the Windhoek Magistrate&#039;s Court on a charge of escaping from lawful custody, securing a release from custody after the first appearance before police corrected the state corrected its actions to re-arrest him.He was acquitted and the case was struck off the roll after Magistrate Ivan Gawanab found yesterday morning that the warrant for his original arrest on March 1, 2021, had not been signed by a magistrate.However, his freedom was short-lived. He was taken back to the cells at the courthouse, and re-arrested after police corrected the mistake. He was then brought before the court again later in the afternoon. The commander of the police in the Khomas Region, Commissioner Ismael Basson, said yesterday afternoon that his office quickly issued a valid warrant again and Mostert was brought to make his second appearance of the day.After Mostert asked for legal representation, the case was postponed until April 22. Before his re-arrest, Mostert argued that the warrant for his arrest last Friday at Noordoewer, also on a charge of escape from lawful detention, was also not valid. He handled his own defence in court. He entered the courtroom with piles of documents, ready for his first appearance. Last year, he illegally escaped from detention from the Auas Hill Hospital in Windhoek, the state charges. Mostert told Magistrate Gawanab yesterday that he could not have escaped from detention illegally because he was in detention illegally.He had been in custody since 1 May 2021 after being apprehended by the police near Tses, when he first tried to return unseen from South Africa to Namibia. The state charges that he was arrested for fraudulently assisting a South African family to obtain Namibian citizenship, in exchange for money.Prior to his arrest, he lived in the Western Cape for about three years while the Namibian authorities requested South Africa to extradite him. He and co-accused Joyline Kambatuku, Eveline Meroro and Joram Solomon face charges under the Anti-Corruption Act and the Immigration Control, Money Laundering, Extortion, Fraud and Attempted Attempt Act.In his initial appearance in court yesterday, Mostert was released after convincing the magistrate, with the state concurring, that both his arrests in 2021 and last Friday were unlawful as they were executed via warrants that were never signed by a magistrate as is procedure.State prosecutor Tatelo Lusepani conceded that there was only an application for a warrant, with a stamp of a magistrate on it but not signed.

Ex-magistrate re-arrested ‘correctly’ after short-lived freedom

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Namibian Sun 2025-07-02

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Ex-magistrate re-arrested ‘correctly’ after short-lived freedom

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Namibian Sun 2025-07-02

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