Kelly Smith, Jaquen Appollis and Steveno van Rhyn have spent their first weekend behind bars as sentenced prisoners for kidnapping and trafficking the then six-year-old Joshlin Smith from Saldanha on the Cape West Coast.

The trio are serving life imprisonment after the prosecution team in the case succeeded in securing their conviction and the maximum sentence.

The prosecution team, who worked tirelessly to achieve the maximum penalty, have described this case as one they would never be able to forget.

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The National Prosecuting Authority’s (NPA) deputy director of Public Prosecutions in the Western Cape, Advocate Zelda Swanepoel says they had limited evidence in this case.

“So, we needed to have a prosecution strategy to actually lead all of this evidence, all of the witnesses’ evidence to lay the basis or the foundation for our section 204 witness, Miss Lombard to then testify. We couldn’t just start there. We needed to lay the foundation first,” says Swanepoel.

Related video | Steveno van Rhyn to challenge his life sentence: