Cape Town, February 7,2012: A memorial for slain Indian-origin honeymooning bride Anni Dewani in a township near Cape Town has been destroyed by construction workers, alleges a South African actress who claims to own the property. Andrea Dondolo, who plays Ayanda in popular SABC2 sitcom Stokvel and Mama in Leon Schuster’s Mama Jack, has applied for a High Court interdict to prevent illegal occupiers who, she claims, are building a house on her property in the township of Khayelitsha. She alleged that all traces of Anni’s memorial have been removed by workers clearing the area ahead of the construction. The property, which Dondolo claims belongs to her, made international headlines after Anni’s body was found on the pavement there in November 2010 in a taxi that her killers abandoned there. One of the killers, taxi driver Zola Tongo, is in jail after a plea bargain in which he implicated Anni’s UK-based husband Shrien Dewani as the brains behind the plot to kill his new bride. Two more alleged conspirators are still on trial and an extradition case to get Shrien Dewani to stand trial in South Africa is still under way. Anni’s parents Vinod and Nilam Hindocha returned to the crime scene in March last year when a local Hindu priest consecrated the site. After watching the ceremony, Dondolo offered a corner of the property for erection of a permanent memorial for Anni. Dondolo is now in a legal battle with the original owner of the property from whom she first bought it, then resold to him because of financial difficulty and then gave him a deposit to buy it back again in 2007. He, meanwhile, sold the land to somebody else, following which the new construction work on it started. “What’s happened next door really hurts not just me but Anni’s parents as well. They have been through enough and don’t need this heartache as well. Anni’s shrine was holy. It was blessed by a priest. It’s disgusting that it has been treated this way,” the actress was quoted as saying by the local media.
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