Oscar’s ex takes the stand

However, on those occasions he always woke her up to ask whether she had heard a suspicious noise too, Taylor said under questioning from State prosecutor Gerrie Nel.

Nel begged Judge Thokozile Masipa’s indulgence to introduce fresh evidence before asking Taylor to describe these incidents, taking the disabled athlete’s defence lawyer by surprise.

It raises questions as to what transpired between Reeva Steenkamp and Pistorius on the night he shot and killed her through a locked toilet door, according to him because he believed there was an intruder was hiding behind it.

Taylor told the High Court in Pretoria, Pistorius also routinely travelled with a gun and on one occasion fired it through the sunroof of a car.

“He carried it around with him.”

Taylor, who began dating Pistorius in 2011 when she was still a teenager, described Pistorius as a volatile man who frequently shouted at her, her best friend and her sister.

“There was a lot of commotion in our relationship,” she said, adding that it ended for good when he attended an award ceremony with Steenkamp.

“He cheated on me with Reeva Steenkamp.”

Taylor was repeatedly asked by Nel whether Pistorius, 27, sounded like a man or a woman when he shouted. She firmly responded: “It sounded like a man, My Lady.”

The question relates to one of the pillars of Pistorius’s defence — that he screams in a high-pitched voice that can readily be mistaken for a woman’s.

His lawyer Barry Roux, SC, has used this argument to undermine the testimony of State witnesses who claim they heard a woman’s terrified cries coming from his house before Steenkamp died.

Roux claims it was in fact his client who they heard scream on the night Steenkamp died as she was too severely injured to make a sound.

Roux said the defence had re-enacted screaming in tests at Pistorius’s home and would submit the results to the court to challenge the testimony.

“On the 21st of February there were indeed tests done and part of the tests was a woman screaming, loud, as loud as she could,” Roux said.

When Roux’s turn came on Friday to cross-examine Taylor, he immediately brought her to tears.

He said she was lying about the end of her relationship with Pistorius and that he would provide copies of their emails to prove this.

Judge Masipa briefly adjourned the court, before Roux resumed questioning and set out to prove that Taylor’s recollection of events during her relationship with Pistorius was unreliable.

This included her account of the night he pulled out his gun to scare off somebody he believed had followed them to his home.

Roux has systematically questioned the credibility of every State witness since the trial began on Monday.

Earlier on Friday, he told Johan Stipp, a neighbour of Pistorius, that the accused cannot remember telling a neighbour that he shot Steenkamp because he believed she was an intruder.

“Mr Pistorius says he can’t remember telling you he thought she was an intruder… He recalls asking you to help him,” said Roux.

Stipp maintained that the Olympic and Paralympic sprinter had given him this explanation for shooting Steenkamp.

“I shot her. I thought she was a burglar. I shot her,” he quoted Pistorius as saying.

Stipp, a radiologist, has also given dramatic testimony of how Pistorius prayed and cried beside his dying girlfriend at the bottom of a staircase in his home.

Describing Steenkamp’s bullet wounds in some detail, the witness, who was the first doctor on the scene of the shooting, said she had lost all pulse and it was too late to save her life.

Pistorius on Monday submitted to the court in his defence statement that he had mistaken Steenkamp for an intruder.

But the State is trying to prove that Pistorius committed premeditated murder and a conviction could see him jailed for life.

– Sapa