Testimony brings mother horrifying memories

**Iuze Mukube **

Four years later, the mother of a 23-year-old woman who was allegedly raped, killed and her body mutilated in Dordabis in 2021, said that testifying about the incident made the memories feel fresh and vivid again.

Katrina Kharises, who was crying and emotional, told Windhoek High Court Judge Eileen Rakow on Thursday in the trial of murder accused Herold Uirab.

Kharises, the biological mother of Lydia Kharises, testified about how sad and heartbroken she felt when a police officer summoned her to a scene where a body had been found.

Upon arriving at the scene, the officer asked her when her daughter had left home.

She stood at a distance and did not go close to where the body was because she was very sad and heartbroken.

She said the body was subsequently loaded and removed from the scene and it was only the following day that the family was informed who was responsible for the killing.

She added that she was summoned to identify the body the following day and identified the body as that of her daughter by her hair and the shorts she was wearing.

Kharises also testified about searching for Lydia after she failed to return home on 11 December 2021.

She stated that she became concerned because Lydia would usually return home the following day wherever she spent the night away but on that occasion she did not return.

Kharises said she went back to work but continued making calls to find out about her daughter’s whereabouts.

After work, while she and her colleagues were walking back to the farm, one of her colleagues, who was using a different path, screamed that he had found a body but did not know whether it belonged to a man or a woman.

Kharises said she was later summoned to the scene, where she was told, “Don’t you want to see your daughter for the last time?” It was then that she realised the body was that of Lydia.

Uirab faces charges of murder, rape, violating a dead human body, and defeating the course of justice or attempting to do so in connection with the death of Lydia Kharises between 11 and 12 December 2021 at Farm Stinkwater in Dordabis.

The State alleges that Uirab killed Lydia and also committed a sexual act with Garises by force and by physically and verbally threatening her.

Additionally, it is alleged that Uirab physically violated Garises’ body by dissecting the genital pubic skin, making an incision to the abdomen with intestine evisceration, or by removing the uterus.

He further allegedly attempted to defeat the course of justice by washing Garises’ blood from his clothes, discarding the clothes and returning to the crime scene to remove his hat.

Uirab is represented by Joas Neemwatya and the State by Maggy Shiyagaya-Lotto.

The matter continues.

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