Secunda Magistrate finds four Ugandans guilty of rape and kidnapping
They were sentenced on July 29.
The four Ugandan nationals Lydia Mojemba (37), Wilson Seyikabi (49), Jingo Wassua (38) and Njobozi Katiti (46) were found guilty in the Secunda Regional Court on July 23.
The three men and a woman were arrested in Ogies in July 2018 after they abducted Mojemba’s niece (also a Ugandan national) at her boyfriend’s house in Secunda.
The niece fell pregnant and Mojemba wanted her to abort the baby.
They appeared before magistrate Graham Cupido last week and he said three of the four are guilty on three charges of rape as two of them held the young woman while a third one inserted abortion tablets into the niece to abort the baby.
When the baby came down, one of the men threw the lifeless body from a bridge onto the train tracks in Ogies.
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The niece eventually escaped from the house where her aunt and the three men held her and hitchhiked to Secunda.
She and her boyfriend and the father of her child went to Secunda Police Station, and the police accompanied them to Ogies where the niece identified the four.
Cupido said in court the accused had different versions of the incidents and it comes down to them denying the allegations against them.
However, the magistrate said he evaluated all the evidence placed before him, and although the niece was a single witness in this case, he found it highly unlikely that she would fabricate the incident, be able to tell it with so much detail and stuck with the same story since the case began in 2018.
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“It does not make sense to me that a 20-year-old woman will make all this up and willingly go to Ogies with these people,” said Cupido.
“If she made all of this up like her aunt said she did, it would be much easier for her to make such stories up in Secunda.”
The magistrate concluded there was enough reliable evidence that the niece was telling the truth and he rejected the evidence of all four.
The four were found guilty on different charges ranging from kidnapping, human trafficking, rape, attempted murder, grievous bodily harm and being in the country illegally.
The case was postponed to yesterday (July 29) for sentencing and the outcome will be published in next week’s edition.
