Zim gay hate killer gets prison sentence

The Zimbabwean man who killed a Moroccan diplomat in Pretoria after becoming enraged at the thought of them having had sex has been sentenced to jail.

On Friday, Nigel Kahari, 21, was told that he will spend 14 years behind bars for stabbing Fatmi Noureddine 42 times with a knife at a Waterkloof guest house in October 2014.

Kahari claimed that he attacked Noureddine after passing out in the room and waking up naked. Fearing he’d been sexually abused, he savagely murdered the man and stole his belongings and R10,000 in cash. Bizarrely, he also took pictures of the dead man’s buttocks on his cell phone.

Kahari insisted that until that point he had no idea that Noureddine might have had a sexual interest in him and said that they had simply been friends.

He justified his anger by explaining that he grew up in Zimbabwe where he was taught to hate homosexuality and said that its president, Robert Mugabe, viewed gay people as “worse than pigs and dogs.”

Pretoria News Weekend reported that Judge Mohamed Ismail described the murder as “a brutal killing” at the sentencing in the Pretoria High Court.

He also said there was no evidence that Kahari had been sexually abused or raped and questioned his account of the incident.

“You plundered him and then took pictures of his lifeless body. You had time to reflect on your actions, but you then embarked on a mission to take his belongings,” the judge said.

A so-called “gay panic defence” is when an accused claims that the victim’s sexuality or romantic or sexual advances caused him or her to go into a state of violent temporary insanity.

President Mugabe has railed against LGBT people for decades as “worse than pigs and dogs” and has insisted that they “don’t have any human rights at all.”