‘I’m scared of u sometimes,’ Steenkamp texted Pistorius

Oscar Pistorius and Reeva Steenkamp argued fiercely in the turbulent weeks before he killed her, according to phone messages revealed at the Olympian’s murder trial.

The athlete’s girlfriend told him she was sometimes scared by his behaviour, which included jealous outbursts in front of other people, the court in Pretoria heard.

“I’m scared of u sometimes and how u snap at me and of how u will react to me,” Reeva Steenkamp texted Pistorius, in a message read out in court by police captain Francois Moller.

In another message, Ms Steenkamp wrote to the double-amputee runner: “I can’t be attacked by outsiders for dating u AND be attacked by you, the one person I deserve protection from.”

The messages suggested both lovers were experiencing emotional insecurity, though the exchanges revealed in court reflected prosecutors’ efforts to portray Pistorius as an aggressor with a short fuse, matching earlier testimony from a former girlfriend who had said he sometimes shouted at her.

In one message, the runner indicated Ms Steenkamp had not told him the full story about smoking “weed”, or using drugs, while she defended past conduct with the declaration: “I wasn’t a stripper or a ‘ho,”’ a slang term for prostitute.

The court adjourned with Mr Moller expected to return to the witness box today. He has not yet revealed if police recovered any phone messages or communications from the night of the killing on February 14, 2013.

Mr Moller said that from Ms Steenkamp’s phone he obtained more than 1,000 exchanges with Pistorius on WhatsApp and other phone messaging applications. Mr Moller said he received as evidence two BlackBerry phones, two iPhones, two iPads and a Mac computer from Pistorius’s house the day after the shooting death of Ms Steenkamp.

The data on Ms Steenkamp’s phone would print to more than 35,000 pages, said Mr Moller. Of the fraction of exchanges between the couple, he said that about 90% were what he called normal and “loving” exchanges.

Mr Moller also read messages exchanged after a shooting incident at Tashas restaurant in Johannesburg about a month before the fatal shooting. Boxer Kevin Lerena and Darren Fresco, a one-time friend of Pistorius, testified that the Olympian asked Mr Fresco to take the blame for a shot that went off after the loaded gun was passed to Pistorius under the table.