South Africa
Police search for serial rapist they thought was dead
After discovering a charred body in a prison, South African police thought the case was closed. But the body was not that of the “Facebook rapist”, who had fled.
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South African police must get back on the trail of the “Facebook rapist”.
photo d’illustration AFP
South African police announced on Monday that they were looking for a fugitive serial killer and rapist whom they thought had been dead since May 2022, following the discovery of a charred body in his Bloemfontein prison cell, where he was serving his sentence. DNA analysis determined that the victim was not Thabo B., police revealed over the weekend.
“At this time, our priority is to find this fugitive and establish how exactly he made up his own death,” police spokeswoman Athlenda Mathe said Monday. Nicknamed the “Facebook rapist”, for having attracted his victims via the social network – at least one of them had been killed -, Thabo B. was sentenced in 2012 to life in prison.
On Sunday, the police revealed that, according to the autopsy, the victim found in his cell had succumbed to a violent blow to the head, before his body was set on fire. A new murder investigation has been opened.
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The case has caused a stir in South Africa, where women’s rights associations regularly criticize the government for its inability to curb violence once morest women. “The script for this story is movie-like and spine-chilling. I can imagine how it was received by its victims,” lamented Bafana Khumalo, co-director of the NGO Sonke Gender Justice. Between October and December 2022, the police recorded no less than 12,000 rapes in the country.
It was a local media, GroundUp, which first expressed doubts, in November 2022, on the death of Thabo B. Since then, photographs showing, according to some, the condemned man shopping in a shopping center in a neighborhood Johannesburg chic have emerged. And several women have publicly claimed that the serial rapist contacted them via social media.
Before his escape, Thabo B. had, it seems, managed, from his cell, to animate, under a false identity, a scam in the media sector. A video, which has gone viral, shows him speaking to a company via video conference, where he claims to be in New York. “The escape of Thabo B. testifies to the incompetence of the prison administration and the endemic corruption of this sector”, denounced the radical left party of the Fighters for economic freedom.
(AFP)
