Four gun-toting black children held up 17 Swedish tourists in Khayelitsha, Cape Town.
The robbery occurred on Monday when the tourists were visiting the Iliso Care Society, which runs programmes including a project to address unemployment, a day-care centre and a food garden.
The children held up the tourists at about 11.30am , said Vivian Zilo, the founder of the NGO.
“The tourists were unperturbed by what has happened to them as they said it is not a true reflection on the situation in the area. They are grateful that they are unharmed,” said Zilo, the foster mother of two children.
Khayelitsha was one of the worst ten murder precincts in 2014. It also has the lowest police-to-population-ratio in the province, at 111 police per 100,000 residents.
“What happened is very sad because it was children as young as 14 who smoke drugs in the community committing this crime.”
Cameras, money and personal belongings were taken by the children. Zilo said the tourists did not want to be named.
Police spokesman Lieutenant- Colonel Andrè Traut confirmed the incident.
“The suspects are still running loose and the matter is under investigation.”
The locals who live off foreign donations are worried that this could give tourists a “bad impression” of the area.
“Some of them are our donors and this also provides a source of income to some unemployed people in the community,” said Zilo.
A commission of inquiry held in the Cape Town black townhsip of Khayelitsha learned yesterday that the South African criminal justice system was no longer able to cope with the number of rapes being committed in the country. As a result, many of the country’s sadistic sexual criminals, often burning or mutilating their victims, were never prosecuted.
“[The number of rapes] can vary… from 50 to 110 cases a month,” Genine Josias, the medical co-ordinator at one of the Thuthuzela care centres in the area, told the commission in Khayelitsha, Cape Town.
According to her, a mere seven percent of perpetrators were ever brought to justice.
“I probably testify in less than 10 percent of the cases I see,” she said.
The rremainder of cases were withdrawn by the state or struck off the court roll for technical reasons.
As with many other problems in the country, these are usually solved by giving them fancy-sounding politically correct names. Thus Khayelitsha with its many thousands of rapists had been given a “Family violence, child protection and sexual offences unit (FCS)” but had only five investigating officers trying to solve crimes in the entire black township.
While up to a third of South Africa’s police budget is consumed by its VIP unit either protecting high-powered politicians or escorting them in fleets of German luxury cars on the country’s highways, “lack of capacity” is often cited as an excuse for police failure. Apparently, while the number of rapes in Khayelitsha are soaring, the number of investigating officers for such crimes has even been reduced.
Those few officers still dealing with the outbreak of sadistic violence, were described as “burnt out” due to their huge caseloads. One officer had 180 dossiers or “dockets” for investigation on his desk.Mob justice was taking hold in Khayelitsha, which was one of the motivating factors for setting up the commission. The South African minister of police had been opposed to holding such an inquiry, but eventually the Constitutional Court gave the go-ahead in October 2013.
Genine Josias was asked by one of the presiding commissioners if she had been aware of a January 2011 newspaper headline on the discovery of sexual offences kits on a field in Delft, a coloured township in Cape Town.
“I am painfully aware of that incident,” Josias replied.
The kits contained forensic evidence, including DNA samples collected by the medical unit and handed to an investigating officer. These had subsequently been “lost” in the field. The officer suspected of the misconduct had since dead and probably those cases had never been submitted to court.
According ot the South African news agency Sapa:
“Josias broke down in tears when asked about a serial rapist who was arrested one year after she raised the alarm in 2010. She and her colleagues had examined at least five girls under the age of nine who survived violent rapes.
“Josias suspected they were the victims of a serial rapist as they were so badly hurt that they had to be examined at a hospital under anaesthesia.”
Although police were repeatedly told about the serial rapes taking place in bushes in Endlovini, on the outskirts of the huge black township, there was no reaction.
Mzwandile Petros
Only when the Western Cape police commissioner Mzwandile Petros was threatened with negative publicity in the media was he prodded into action, dispensing a task force to investigate the issue.
“Many more girls were raped and I just think they could have done something earlier, you know, to prevent that,” a tearful Josias said.
The suspect, thought to be responsible for raping 21 girls, was eventually convicted of 11 such cases on the basis of DNA samples.
“He had no choice but to plead guilty… it didn’t actually go to an open court because the evidence was overwhelming.” But Josias also complained of her hard work coming to naught due to police incompetence and lack of motivation. She also accused the ANC government of “having no idea” of the long-term psychological effects of the country’s rape pandemic.
“It’s not about my hard work. That is my job. We are failing our people. We are failing helpless kids, children that are innocent.”
According to an analysis of the latest crime stats by the Istitute for Security Studies, the murder rate in Cape Town is almost twice as high as that of Johannesburg.
Lizette Lancaster, a researcher at the Institute, writes: “Between April 2011 and March 2012, police recorded more murders in Cape Town than in Johannesburg and Pretoria combined. This means that, taking population into account, Cape Town residents are 1,8 times more likely to be murdered than Johannesburg residents. Yet this information is potentially misleading because the likelihood of being a crime victim depends in large part on race, gender, age, economic profile and where in a city a person lives.”
For example, almost two-thirds of the Cape Town murders took place in just ten of the 60 police station precincts in the city, according to an analysis of crime hotspots by the Institute for Security Studies (ISS). For years, the Coloured area of Mitchells Plain has experienced the highest violence and property crime rates in the country.
Black areas in Cape Town show ‘abnormally high murder rates’
Although surpassed by Coloured (mixed-race) areas regarding general violent crime, black townships in Cape Town showed the highest murder rates. According to Lizette Lancaster, “Nyanga, Khayelitsha, Gugulethu and Harare remain the most murderous in the peninsula, according to an analysis that takes population size into account. These areas have experienced abnormally high murder rates for more than a decade.”
Similarly, a countrywide analysis of police precinct statistics suggests that income levels matter. Residents in low-income areas are far more likely to be murdered than their middle- and high-income counterparts. Half of South Africa’s murders occurred in only 13% of police precincts (or in 143 out of 1 127).
The focus tends to fall on South Africa’s national murder rate, which is almost five times higher than the global average of 6,9 murders per 100 000 people. However, about 13% of police precincts in South Africa had lower murder rates than this, including affluent areas such as Brooklyn (Pretoria), Garsfontein (Pretoria), Camps Bay, Claremont, Rondebosch (Cape Town), Edenvale and Linden (Gauteng). Over 10% of South African policing precincts – more than 115 stations – experienced no murders, while three in four murders occurred in just a quarter of the country’s police precincts. Suburbs like Sandton, Parkview (Johannesburg), Durban North, Table View and Woodstock (Cape Town) had a murder rate of just under 10 per 100 000 people.
Although murder is often used as the main indicator to support arguments that South Africa is a violent country, it makes up only 2,5% of all violent crime. While there were 16 259 murders in 2012/13, over 600 000 other violent crimes were also reported to the police, including attempted murder, rape, robbery and assault.
Most murder victims are young black men
A vast majority of the murders that take place daily do not make the news. They happen in areas where crime and violence are the norm, and where residents already feel marginalised and forgotten. The majority of murders are neither premeditated nor committed as part of a crime, but occur when an argument leads to physical assault. Research shows that most victims are killed by acquaintances, friends or family members during disputes fuelled by alcohol or drug abuse.
Victimisation surveys, police docket surveys and mortuary surveillance studies reveal that most South African murder victims are young black men. These studies also reveal that most murdered women are killed by their intimate partners, and that men are six times more likely to be killed than women. However, violence affects all South Africans, and the resultant trauma has lasting physical, emotional and often financial consequences.
The month of activism against the abuse of women and children is not off to a good start. This past weekend in Ceres in the Western Cape, a 7 year-old boy and a 4 month-old baby were raped by the same man. Police Spokesperson Lieutenant-Colonel Andre Traut clarified earlier reports and confirmed that the children are not siblings though they live on the same farm.
The baby was taken from her parent’s bed while they were sleeping. The man allegedly took the baby to another area of the home where he raped her brutally. The little boy was raped by the same man. The baby was taken to the Red Cross Children’s Hospital where she underwent reconstructive surgery. She is expected to remain there for some time. On Tuesday, a suspect was taken in for questioning.
Western Cape Police Commissioner Arno Lamoer confirmed that a man is being held and interrogated for information about the two rapes. The man recently moved in with the family on the farm. He was considered a family friend. The residents are angered by the brazenness of the attack. Many are shocked that a crime of this nature could take place in the usually quiet and peaceful town of Ceres. Ceres is known for its farms and vineyards.
The Justice Department will proceed with its programme of campaigns which are scheduled for the entire month of August in areas such as Khayelitsha, Delft, Mitchells Plain and Khayamandi in the Western Cape. The campaigns intend to address issues surrounding violence against women and children and to find practical solutions to assist victims.
Meanwhile, a coloured Paarl policeman who allegedly raped a 14-year-old girl appeared in court earlier.
Warrant officer Anthony Gouws pleaded not guilty to five charges of rape of a minor.
Gouws is out on R1500 bail.
He was arrested in July after the victim’s mother alerted authorities after she saw an inappropriate message Gouws had sent her daughter.
“Mr Anthony Gouws did appear at the Paarl Magistrate Court on five charges of rape. The matter has been postponed to 29 August,” NPA spokesperson Eric Ntabazalila said.
Rape, particularly child rape, in common in South African and has increased dramatically after 1994.
Women and children are constantly victims of heinous, sex-fuelled crimes. Many of the victims end up permanently scarred and disfigured or worse; dead.
A specialized task team was set up to investigate the rapes of the baby girl and young boy.
Patients of the TB center in Khayelitsha, South Africa, wait to see doctors, March 23, 2009. Tuberculosis is a contagious lung disease that spreads through the air, including through coughing and sneezing.
In a patient’s fight against tuberculosis—the bacterial lung disease that kills more people annually than any infectious disease besides HIV— doctors have more than 10 drugs from which to choose. Most of those didn’t work for Uvistra Naidoo, a South African doctor who contracted the disease in his clinic. For those who contract the disease now, maybe none of them will.
A new paper published earlier this week in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Emerging Infectious Diseases journal warns that the first cases of “totally drug-resistant” tuberculosis have been found in South Africa and that the disease is “virtually untreatable.”
Like many bacterial diseases, tuberculosis has been evolving to fend off many effective antibiotics, making it more difficult to treat. But even treatable forms of the disease are particularly tricky to cure; drug sensitive strains must be treated with a six-month course of antibiotics. Tougher cases require long-term hospitalization and a regimen of harsh drugs that can last years.
Naidoo, then an avid runner, says he continued training for months with the disease, which affects more than 389,000 South Africans annually (about one fourth of Africa’s cases), according to the World Health Organization. It wasn’t until he went to visit his family in Durban (he had been working with TB patients in a pediatric clinic in Cape Town) that his family noticed he had lost more than 30 pounds.
“I had flu symptoms and chest pains, but I was still running so I didn’t think anything was wrong,” he says. But when he went in for an X-ray, doctors found that his entire right lung had filled with fluid. Within weeks, he was on his deathbed as his body wasn’t responding to the most commonly prescribed antibiotics.
“One night I nearly passed away—it didn’t look good,” he says.
His father, also a physician, suggested that he may have had an emerging MDR, or a multi drug-resistant strain of TB. The emergence of MDR and its even more dangerous cousin, XDR (extremely drug-resistant TB), have pushed tuberculosis cure rates in the country from a high of 73 percent in 2008 down to 53 percent in 2010.
Naidoo survived the night and doctors eventually found a treatment regimen that worked, but he was in and out of the hospital for three years, and the drugs’ side effects were almost unbearable, he says. He developed Stevens-Johnson Syndrome, a complication that causes layers of skin to separate from each other and can be deadly. He regularly bled from his eyes. He fell into a deep depression.
“The TB doesn’t feel like it’s killing you, but the drugs do. I am a doctor and was informed that the drugs you take make you feel worse,” he says. “My case was three years long. I don’t think the average patient has that kind of patience.”
At King George V hospital in Durban—one of South Africa’s most popular TB clinics, which specifically treats XDR patients—the 200 beds are always full, and there’s a four- to six-week waitlist for new patients.
William Bishai, of the Johns Hopkins Center for TB Research Laboratory and head of the KwaZulu-Natal Research Institute for Tuberculosis and HIV in South Africa, works with Naidoo and says his commitment to getting better is uncharacteristic in South Africa. TB is particularly easy to contract among people who have compromised immune systems due to HIV infection—a group that makes up about 12 percent of the country’s population.
“There’s a co-infection problem with HIV—a lot of XDR patients also have HIV and have to take eight TB drugs in addition to their HIV retrovirals,” he says. “The average uneducated person would be prone to giving up. There have been a number of suicides at King George V.” – usnews.com
The minister of police must intervene when people take the law into their own hands, the Freedom Front Plus said on Monday.
“The necklacing of alleged criminals in Khayelitsha the last two weeks by the community is a danger sign and creates anarchy,” FFPlus spokesman Pieter Groenewald said in a statement.
A man was found “necklaced” in the Harare section of Khayelitsha, in Cape Town, at 7am on Sunday, police said. His feet had been bound with rope.
Necklacing is the placing of a tyre around someone’s neck, dousing it with petrol and setting it alight to burn the person to death. .
Warrant Officer November Filander on Monday said it was believed the man who died was the victim of mob justice.
On Saturday, a man was also found dead in D Block, Lingelethu-West, Khayelitsha, with a tyre and concrete drain cover on his chest.
The man was on his back and blood was coming out of his mouth and ears. His feet were also bound with rope.
Filander said no arrests had been made.
The FFPlus would ask Police Minister Nathi Mthethwa in Parliament what steps would be taken to restore law and order in Khayelitsha and to restore the community’s trust in the police.
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