Pistorius trial: Messages show couple`s affection

The chief lawyer for Oscar Pistorius on Tuesday sought to show at the athlete`s murder trial that he had a loving relationship with the girlfriend he killed, referring to telephone messages in which they exchanged warm compliments and said they missed each other.

Pretoria: The chief lawyer for Oscar Pistorius today sought to show at the athlete`s murder trial that he had a loving relationship with the girlfriend he killed, referring to telephone messages in which they exchanged warm compliments and said they missed each other.

The testimony contrasted with several messages read out in court at the request of the prosecution a day earlier in which Pistorius and Reeva Steenkamp argued in the weeks before he fatally shot her. In those messages, Steenkamp told the double-amputee runner that she was sometimes scared by his behavior, which included jealous outbursts in front of other people. Defence lawyer Barry Roux noted that the tense messages amounted to a tiny fraction of the roughly 1,700 messages that police Capt. Francois Moller, a cellular telephone expert, extracted from the mobile devices of the couple. Roux noted a January 19 exchange in which Reeva sent Pistorius a photo of herself in a hoodie and making a kissing face, followed by the message: "You like it?" "I love it," Pistorius said, according to the message. "So warm," Steenkamp responded. Roux was also granted permission to show CCTV video, earlier broadcast by Sky News, that showed Pistorius and Steenkamp kissing in a convenience store. And he asked Moller to read out a January 9 message from the model to her athlete boyfriend. It read: "You are a very special person. You deserve to be looked after." Chief prosecutor Gerrie Nel questioned the relevance of showing the convenience store video, saying he could ask for a courtroom viewing of another video, also broadcast by Sky News, that shows Pistorius at a gun range, firing a shotgun and using a pistol to shoot a watermelon, which bursts on impact. Nel also said that many messages of affection between the couple were brief, in contrast to the texted arguments, which were far longer and dwelled on their relationship in greater depth.