John Hope Muchirahondo appears in the Christchurch High Court on 29 July, 2024. Photo: RNZ / Nate McKinnon
Warning: This story discusses details which may be triggering.
A police officer says it was an oversight that underwear from a sexual assault complainant was not sent for forensic testing, despite the lab requesting it.
The trial of John Hope Muchirahondo, who has pleaded not guilty to more than 30 charges, including multiple of rape and sexual violation, is currently being held in the High Court at Christchurch.
On Friday, the court heard police had been investigating Muchirahondo for some time prior to his arrest.
Detective Sergeant Brad Grainger said he searched his name in the police data base after receiving a rape complaint in 2021.
He told the court he immediately rang his boss when he saw the search results.
"When I searched our computer system in relation to John Hope Muchirahondo, it identified that there was a number of investigations against his name," Grainger said.
This was the first time he had heard of Muchirahondo and learned of the wider investigation, called Operation Hope, he said.
Grainger arrested Muchirahondo and was involved in helping to collect evidence from the complainant in February 2021.
Defence lawyer Anselm Williams asked Grainger if he recalled getting a letter requesting the underwear of the complainant be sent to an Environmental Science and Research lab for forensic testing.
Grainger said he did not, and Williams pushed as to why the underwear was not sent.
"Do you want to directly answer my question as to whether it would have been a good idea to have the underwear analysed?" he asked.
"For the purposes of completeness, yes. It was an oversight that it wasn't sent to ESR," Grainger said.
"I believed that it was unnecessary to send the underwear due to the DNA evidence that we had and what I think is an unlikely explanation in relation to how that DNA was placed there."
The evidence included multiple DNA swabs which had already been taken from the complainant and sent for analysis, he said.
Williams suggested on Thursday that another witness in the trial who was also in the house at the time the woman says she was raped, was responsible - not Muchirahondo.
He asked if it would have been unusual to find someone other than Muchirahondo's DNA on the woman's underwear, and Grainger said yes.
The police officer said the results of the DNA swab testing covered the same areas as her underwear and did not return any possible matches for the other two males in the house at the time.
But there was a likely match for Muchirahondo.
The trial will continue on Monday.
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