If the BBC Panorama team don’t even know what day of the week it is, how can anything else they broadcast possibly be accepted as accurate without corroboration?
In the following excerpt from the program, starting at 15min 36sec, the Panorama screen graphic says “Friday 18:13“. Presenter Jeremy Vine says:
“Just about the time Tongo left the Colosseum Hotel, new footage reveals Shrien Dewani returning to the Cape Grace. He had been to a bureau de change, changing £800 into Rand, and he’d been shopping for a red rose for his bride. Five minutes after Shrien arrived back at their room, Anni spoke to her parents…“
Panorama then show a clip of Anni’s father: “It wasn’t her voice. It wasn’t, it wasn’t normal Anni. I found… something is not OK.”
and Vine says: “It was the last time they ever spoke.”
BBC Panorama 2013: The Honeymoon Murder – Who killed Anni?
With those words…
Panorama in 2013, misrepresent as fact that Anni’s last phone call with her parents took place on Friday, alleging it was moments after Shrien Dewani returned from buying a red rose for her (oh, and just by the way, obtaining £800 worth of Rand from a bureau de change).
Jeremy Vine and his Panorama pals are revealed, unmistakeably, to be a heartless bunch whose professed sympathy for Anni’s grieving family is as fake as their purported investigation. How could they possibly get that particular detail wrong? How could they even think about using that emotionally fraught event in the way they have – as a distraction, a lure to take peoples’ attention away from hard evidence, which might implicate one accused of her murder.
In every other media account dating back to November 2010, including Panorama itself in 2012, the final call between Anni and her father took place the following day – Saturday – just hours before she was brutally murdered. Shrien Dewani was quoted in the Daily Mail: “…on the afternoon of the attack, Anni suggested that we should talk to our families. We phoned them all: our parents, grandparents and aunts and told them what a wonderful time we were having.” (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1330051/My-guilt-Shrien-Dewani-husband-bride-Cape-Town-carjack-murder.html)
Here is the footage from BBC Panorama 2012:
So why has Panorama changed Saturday to Friday?
Vine brings three things to our attention in quick succession:
- that Shrien Dewani had changed £800 into Rand,
- that he had bought a red rose for Anni, and
- that on his return, Anni called her parents for the last time.
Vine does not explore or mention the first and second items for the remainder of the program, and gives the third item only cursory follow-up; in the ensuing 15 seconds we see 2012 footage of Vinod Hindocha explaining that “something was not OK”, then Vine tells us, “It was the last time they ever spoke”. And that is all. Nothing more is said about that either.
Mentioning those emotionally charged second and third items in quick succession causes the first item to appear relatively less important. If that is the effect, we can assume that was also the intent of the programme producers to skip lightly over and not discuss the topic of Shrien changing so much money in the afternoon on Friday, and then going with Tongo at midday the following day, Saturday, to change a further US$1,500 into local currency. On his return to the hotel on Saturday, Shrien can be seen sprinting down the corridor to his room to get changed and to then return to the poolside, to Anni.
Why do Vine and his forensic experts, impartial and unbiased seekers after truth, choose to not pursue that topic of interest? It is after all, in the police docket. Why would Shrien need to change US$1,500 on the Saturday, having only just exchanged £800 late on Friday, the day before?
Any independent forensic expert would deem every action of a murder suspect before and after the murder to be relevant. So why do Panorama attempt to hide this transaction behind stories of buying a red rose and a last phone call (which, by the way, didn’t actually happen on the Friday as they suggest)? Why do the impartial and independent Mr Vine, and his impartial and independent experts, show so little interest in following up on this matter?
What we can learn from this segment of the programme, is that according to Panorama, Friday is Saturday. But beyond that, and more importantly, we can see just what kind of heartless and ruthless individuals are lurking in the background of this travesty of journalism.
PANORAMA BUSTED 