By Hanti Otto
Court Reporter
While Derric Barrett was due on Thursday to start serving his sentence for the Villieria explosion in 2000, his son has announced that he was in fact the one responsible for the blast that killed three people, and not his father.
Barrett, 67, was arrested Wednesday after the Pretoria Regional Court issued a warrant. This was after his appeal against his conviction and sentence were turned down.
He was supposed to report to the court on February 8 to start serving his sentence of six years.
As this did not happen, the court issued a warrant to be executed in Balfour, Mpumalanga, where Barrett was.
His legal representatives rushed to the Pretoria High Court with an urgent application to extend his bail until his petition to the Appeal Court had been finalised.
The court found that such an application should be brought before the full bench of judges, who rejected Barrett's appeal.
Barrett was expected to spend Wednesday night in a cell at the Villieria police station before reporting to the clerk of Pretoria Magistrates Court on Thursday to be taken to prison.
The suburb of Villieria was rocked by an explosion on October 10, 2000, that damaged several houses and killed three people, including Barrett's wife and an employee.
During the trial he claimed that he did not place the explosives in the garage and did not know who had stored them there.
On April 29, 2003, he was convicted on a charge of culpable homicide, possession of explosives on unlicensed premises and not keeping a firearm in a safe place.
He was sentenced to five years' imprisonment for the culpable homicide charge, one year for the possession of explosives and a suspended sentence for failure to store the firearm in a proper place.
He was granted bail pending his appeal, which was supposed to be heard in February 2005.
However, according to court papers this appeal was heard only in July 2007 and again postponed, as the judges could not reach a unanimous decision.
The appeal was again heard by a full bench of judges in 2009. It was rejected on December 11 last year.
Barrett said in a statement in support of his urgent application that his lawyer advised him to make a petition to the Appeal Court, and that if he would receive a notice to report for his sentence, they would apply for an extension of his bail.
The petition to the Appeal Court was lodged last month.
By the end of the month, Barrett learnt about "new evidence" - that his son had allegedly stored the explosives in his garage 10 years ago.
He applied for condonation and that this new evidence be heard.
On Tuesday, the investigating officer phoned Barrett, informing him to report to the police by 8am on Wednesday to start his sentence.
As the urgent High Court action was not successful, Barrett was arrested.
According to a statement his son, Hilton, 37, accepted responsibility for the explosion.
He realised he was exposing himself to prosecution but was willing to hand himself over to the police.
Hilton said he had worked for his father's blasting company and was in charge of the magazine where the explosives were being kept.
Referring to the explosion that killed his mother and saw his father facing a jail term, Hilton said he had kept quiet all these years out of fear of prosecution and guilt over the loss of lives.
"I cannot live with my conscience any more and see my father serving time in prison for a crime he did not commit," he said.
"I started drinking and my marriage collapsed three years after the incident."
He claimed that he took explosives to a premises the day before the incident. At the end of the day there were four or five bags left.
Although he was supposed to destroy them, Hilton took them to the magazine.
The next day he picked them up again, but his mother phoned him to pick up a document from the house.
"I gave one of the employees instructions to put the explosives in the garage, while I gave the percussion caps to my mother. I locked the garage and left. My father was not at home at that stage," Hilton stated.
When he later returned to his parents' home, he found the neighbourhood in chaos.