Mother pleads for help to find her missing son

A desperate Pretoria mother is pleading for help to locate her teenage son who went missing last week.

Phindiwe Yose said yesterday it has been eight days since her son, Njabulo, 17, did not return from Voortrekkerhoogte High School in Centurion.

He was last seen wearing grey school pants, a white vest and a grey tracksuit top. “He went missing on 13 March.

“He was last seen with three friends at around 9pm on the way to Kgosi Mampuru,” she said. Yose said she feared the worst and had asked everyone she could think of if they had seen her missing son.

“It’s difficult because he doesn’t have a phone. His friends told me they don’t know where he is,” she said. Yose said she has been told he was seen in a dangerous place close to Kgosi Mampuru. “It’s not safe, even the police are scared to go there.

“Maybe he found his way there and is too scared to come out. “He is not into drugs, because they tested him recently,” she said. Yose said on the day of his disappearance, her son got into a fight with another boy at school.

“The other boy’s mother came to fetch him at school, so it doesn’t have anything to do with him,” she added.

Yose said the school didn’t know where her son was and couldn’t help her find him, either.

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Increase in reports of missing children

Missing children have been in the spotlight lately following the disappearance of six-year-old Joshlin Smith, who went missing a month ago in Saldanha Bay in the Western Cape.

Criminologist Prof Jaco Barkhuizen said the increase in reports of missing children was worrying. He said kidnappings and abductions were not gender-related.

“Children are more likely to be abducted and kidnapped because they are easier to control, move and overpower,” he explained.

Barkhuizen said the fact that there are more and more reports of children going missing illustrated that South Africa needed a national amber alert system to notify society at large when a child goes missing.

“The quicker there is a notice out on a missing child, the quicker we can look for and hopefully find the child and apprehend the person involved in the child’s disappearance,” he said.

“Joshlin is still missing. If we had a proper amber alert system for when people and children go missing, we would not have so many cases like Joshlin’s.”

Barkhuizen said the government has used the Rica system to get information that could be used to alert the public.

“The systems are already in place. They just need to be used for something as useful as combating crime,” he said. – marizkac@citizen.co.za

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