According to his mother, Mrs Zengi Miriam Montsho, a Sotho-speaking neighbour came to their home on 25 February, promising 20-year-old Mabuti and four of his friends a job opportunity on the mines near Stilfontein area.
Mabuti finished his school career at Goudwes while his friends are all former learners of Tswasongu High School in Khutsong.
Communicating through an interpreter, a relative, Ms Cathryn Montsho, told the Herald that he had come to ask his mother’s permission to go with the others.
“The neighbour organised the transport to Stilfontein,” she said.
When the other boys returned home on 6 April, however, Mabuti was not with them.
When the family continued pressing the tired, frightened youths for answers, the picture of what had happened eventually emerged.
The boys arrived at Stilfontein but soon found out that they would not be working in a regular mine but as underground cable thieves.
When they refused, their “bosses” pulled out firearms and threatened them until they cooperated.
One day, after they had finished working in an old mine shaft, they were tired from all the hard labour. When their bosses pulled them out with a rope, Mabuti’s bruised hands slipped and he fell back into the shaft.
After realising he was dead, the captors removed his body from the shaft and threw it into another shaft where it could not be found.
“We are devastated and just want his body back. We went to the police in Stilfontein and Khutsong but they said they could not help us,” Mabuti’s mother sobs.
The families of the other boys fear for their safety. The youths say the men from Stilfontein had warned them not to tell anyone what had happened.
They also took the boys’ names down so they could trace them if necessary.
According to family members, the man who organised the ‘job opportunity’ does not live in Ext. 3 anymore. Some people claim to have seen him moving around elsewhere in Khutsong.
The Herald has heard of at least one other boy from Khutsong Ext. 5, who had been lured away under similar circumstances.
“I can understand that the boys would do anything to get work as there is no work here in Khutsong.
But this matter shows that our young people must be very wary of falling into the same trap,” a community leader from the area, Jacob Gumede, says.
