Detectives able to recover incriminating screenshots

The cellphone records of Zane Kilian, the man accused of pinging slain Anti-Gang Unit detective Charl Kinnear and top criminal lawyer William Booth, were revealed in the Western Cape High Court on Wednesday.

An investigation by the Hawks Task Team uncovered that while Kilian, the co-accused of alleged underworld kingpin, Nafiz Modack, had deleted WhatsApp from his phone prior to his arrest, detectives were able to recover a picture gallery filled with incriminating screen shots.

Taking to the stand for the second day, Hawks detective Captain Edward du Plessis told the court how he put the pieces of the puzzle together after three phones were confiscated from Kilian.

He said the evidence presented to court came from one main device, a Samsung J4.

Du Plessis explained that among some of the documents found were consumer trace reports done on Booth, where all his personal information was stored on Kilian’s phone.

Further investigations into Kilian’s communications became hamstrung when they realised the WhatsApp application had been deleted, but clever cops found that traces of images shared on WhatsApp were saved in the phone’s picture gallery, and they delved further.

Here, Du Plessis said, he found screen shots of the consumer trace reports that had been sent to a contact, saved on Kilian’s phone as “Nafiz 3” on 14 March 2020.

According to the ping reports shown at the high court, on the same date, cops had found that Booth had been pinged 49 times in just one day.

The records shown to the court indicate that Booth was pinged excessively throughout the day and at one point the pings were done less than a minute apart.

Further evidence shown at court indicate that Kilian also saved screen shots of conversations with a state witness named Abraar Bhamjee.

Du Plessis said while Bhamjee would be called to testify, the Hawks teams were able to establish that the car used in the attempted assassination of Booth at his Higgovale home on 9 April 2020, a Hyundai Creta, belonged to Bhamjee.

Further images found on Kilian’s phone show that consumer trace reports were also generated on Kinnear on 20 April 2020, the same day that the pinging of his cellphone number commenced.

Du Plessis added that the personal details of Kinnear’s widow, Nicolette, were also found by using the MarisIT system to trace her details.

The trial continues.