A video showing the moment Reshall Jimmy burnt to death in his Ford Kuga more than three years ago was at the centre of a dispute over evidence at the inquest into his death at the Western Cape High Court yesterday.

A TimesLIVE report notes that Advocate Gerrie Nel, on behalf of the Jimmy family, alleges a cover-up by Ford and collusion with the state. Likewise, Ford's lawyers have made claims about missing evidence and an incomplete police investigation.

Herman Keuler testified yesterday about how he started filming a burning Kuga in Wilderness after hearing a loud bang and a woman shouting. Keuler said he heard a sound ‘almost like a shotgun’ and seconds later a woman yelling for help. When he was questioned by Nel about his statement, made by phone to a private investigator hired by Ford, he said the sound was like fireworks.

He could not emphatically say whether he heard a gunshot going off, an assertion which Ford's lawyer, Advocate André Bezuidenhout, tried to extract during cross-examination of Keuler.

In his statement, Keuler described returning to the scene the next morning and seeing an object that looked like a brass bullet casing the size of an AA battery. He said he called the investigating officer and told him what he saw, adding that he could not say for sure if it was a bullet casing.

Nel pointed out that the investigating officer went and retrieved the object and confirmed that it was not a bullet casing. He also questioned Keuler as to whether his evidence about hearing something which ‘sounded almost like a shotgun’ was introduced to him by the private investigator.

Keuler said they were his own words.

Full TimesLIVE report

Former Ford SA chief executive Jeff Nemeth told a police witness to change his statement to include details which could make the Ford Kuga fire look like foul play. Times Select reports this was the testimony of Andrew Roberts, who told Judge Robert Henney that Nemeth called him and told him to contact Weber & Wentzel Attorneys to include details of evidence which were absent from the statement he initially gave to the police investigating the fire.

Nel grilled Roberts yesterday, alleging that he was working with Ford and hiding his alleged prejudice towards coloured people. This was after Roberts included in his statement to Ford’s lawyers that he saw at least two coloured males in a Toyota Corolla making a U-turn about 800m before the scene of the fire.

Reading from the statement he made to Ford’s lawyers, Roberts said that after the flames were extinguished by the fire department, a police officer walked by and said there was someone in the car with a hole in their head. Under questioning by Nel, Roberts said police came to him and his friend to inform them that the autopsy had found that the cause of Jimmy’s death was as a result of him passing out and the car catching on fire.

He said that he made his statement to Ford after this. In his statement to Ford, Roberts claimed that he did tell the investigating officer about the Corolla and the comment by the policeman that there was a hole in the head of the occupant of the car, but the investigator told him ‘not to think about it’ and that ‘the heat could have caused that’.

Full Times Select report