By Shaun Smillie, Siyabonga Mkhwanazi, Se-Anne Rall and Brenda Masilela.
Johannesburg - Dressed in a mustard coloured Nike tracksuit and sporting a man bun, serial rapist and killer Thabo Bester lapped up the media attention in the Bloemfontein Magistrate’s Court yesterday.
There was no hiding behind a hoodie and face mask as his lover Dr Nandipha Magudamana had done the day before.
Bester eyeballed cameras, smirked and even raised his hand to address the court.
But Magistrate Mohlolo Kgabisi would have none of it. He denied Bester’s request to speak.
Kgabisi also told Bester he would not be granted any special privileges after the fugitive’s lawyer told the court his client hadn’t eaten in 48 hours because he feared he might be poisoned. For the last eight years he had safely eaten prison food, the magistrate pointed out.
Having spent 11 months on the run after walking out of the Mangaung Correctional Centre, Bester was guarded inside the court room by officers from the SAPS’s National Intervention Unit armed with assault rifles.
Bester now faces the added charges of fraud, defeating the ends of justice, escaping and violating a body.
For South Africans, it was their first glimpse on TV of Bester, the man who over the last month had become Public Enemy Number One. He and Magudamana were tracked down in Tanzania and apprehended over the weekend. They returned to South Africa in a private jet.
One of those South Africans staring into her TV screen away from the chaos of the court was Bester’s mother, Maria Mabaso, who wanted to see her son and confirm that it was him. She said she would not be visiting him.
“I will ask some people to go and see him. I will never visit him; I don’t have that heart. I don’t, I don’t...I’m sure it will be my death. I can’t handle what I’m seeing on TV; what will happen when I see it live?... What will happen to me when I see it live?... I have other kids to live for,” she said.
Mabaso was speaking to eNCA yesterday after her son appeared in court.
Mabaso said she had not been in contact with Bester since he escaped from the Mangaung Correctional Centre and was unaware that he was living a luxurious lifestyle with Magudumana.
In the dock Bester said he did not immediately intend to apply for bail, but would apply later.
On Thursday, Magudumana learnt she is facing charges of aiding and abetting an escapee, murder, violation of bodies and fraud.
To date, the people arrested over Bester’s escape also include Magadumana's father, Zolile Cornelius Sikelele, former G4S employee Senohe Ishmael Matsoara and Integritron CCTV technician Tebogo James Lipholo.
It is alleged they were part of an escape plan that included smuggling a dead body into the prison to stage Bester’s death.
In court the State’s lawyer Sello Matlhoko said investigators would need more time to build their case. The matter was adjourned to next month.
Yesterday Home Affairs Minister Dr Aaron Motsoaledi revealed that although they had no record of Bester’s ID because he had never been issued with one, he was born at the Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital in Soweto and his mother never registered his birth.
Motsoaledi said Bester was born on June 13, 1986. Mabaso, who was 16 when she gave birth to Bester, had she never registered his birth with home affairs.
Motsoaledi said their investigations found that Bester had attended school in the south of Johannesburg in 1997 but dropped out of school in Grade 5 in 2002.
Motsoaledi said there were many prisoners in custody without IDs to avoid being detected for their alleged involvement in crimes.
Police Minister Bheki Cele told Parliament on Thursday that Bester was identified through his fingerprints which were stored in the SAPS criminal database after he was arrested and sentenced for rape and murder in 2012.
It also emerged from Cele and senior police officials that Bester was on parole for fraud when he was arrested for rape and murder in 2012.
Yesterday, the editor of the news site GroundUp, which broke the story, said Bester’s escape was one of those stories that was both immensely interesting to the public and of immense public interest.
“It has captured the public imagination because his escape was so audacious and absurd. The love interest with celebrity doctor Nandipha Magudumana adds to this,” wrote editor Nathan Geffen. “But GroundUp is not known for covering salacious stories, like this Bonnie and Clyde tale. Certainly such stories should be reported. But we have a very specific focus: human rights stories that bigger publications often don’t have the resources to cover.”
Geffen wrote that when GroundUp was given information last October by Justice Edwin Cameron, the Inspecting Judge of Correctional Services (who is also a GroundUp board member, but has no role in the organisation’s editorial decisions), that something strange had happened on May 3, 2022, in the G4S-run maximum security prison in Mangaung, “we did not believe that Bester had escaped. It seemed like the stuff of a far-fetched crime novel”.
“This story opened the floodgates. That day we received photographic evidence from a member of the public showing Bester and Magudumana shopping in Woolworths in Sandton City a month after Bester’s supposed death. We examined the metadata in the photo and also confirmed with two other people who knew Bester well that it was indeed him. We published the photos on March 16. From that point we ceased speculating about whether Bester had escaped; it was now pretty much a certainty.
“The story erupted into one of the biggest scandals in South African prison history. And that is how an investigation which started for us as a matter of public interest became a story of such huge interest to the public,” wrote Geffen.
Read the full story here.