‘Weeping Pistorius prayed: let her live’

As his girlfriend lay dying, a weeping, praying Oscar Pistorius knelt at her side and struggled in vain to help her breathe by holding two fingers in her clenched mouth, a witness told a South African court.

“‘I shot her. I thought she was a burglar. I shot her,’ ” radiologist Johan Stipp recalled Pistorius saying.

A few minutes later, Mr Stipp said, Pistorius went upstairs — the area where he had shot Reeva Steenkamp — and then returned.