Komatipoort girl Dimakatso Shabangu, 6: her muti-killers get life sentences for harvesting child's body parts while she was alive
Judge Colin Lamont: "Her private parts were removed, but the tongue was not removed. It shows that she was cut between the legs and the stomach. They were (cutting her) while she was alive: four people were holding her and one cutting her. Her intestines were removed while she was being cut."
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March 7 2014 By SAPA -- Nelspruit Mrs Stella Sibongile Zulu 24, and Mr Sifiso Woinder Vilakazi, 49, from Masibekela near Komatipoort, were found guilty of cutting up a six-year-old girl while she was alive to harvest her body for parts of which traditional medicine (muti) is made.
The couple had thrown the child's mutilated body into the river on April 21 2009. The couple were sentenced to life in prison by the Nelspruit Circuit of the Pretoria High Court on Friday. At least five people helped kill the child, however.
Stella Sibongile Zulu (25) and Sifiso Wonder Vilakazi (49), from Masibekela near Komatipoort, were convicted of murder and abduction, a Sapa correspondent reported.
The court found that they killed Dimakatso Shabangu, who went missing on April 21, 2009. Her body was found floating in a river four days later.
“This was planned because you knew that you will benefit. The way the child was killed was horrific,” Judge Collin Lamont told Zulu and Vilakazi.
“ I can see how the child felt when they removed her (body) parts, while she was alive. You referred to it as if "it was like a chicken the way she was cut.”
Lamont said photographic evidence of the crime was horrific.He said Zulu's description of the murder corresponded with everything in the post-mortem, except for details about the child's tongue, which she said was removed.
“The post-mortem says how it all happened... Private parts were removed, but the tongue was not removed. It shows that she was cut between the legs and the stomach,” Lamont said.
He said animals and fish ate at the child's body while it was floating in the river. “They were doing it (cutting her) while she was alive. Four people were holding her, and one cutting her,” Lamont said.
“Her intestines were removed while she was being cut. It was not clear that you saw everything, but that does not mean this case has no weight.”
Prosecutor Sonja Ntuli asked the court to sentence the two to life imprisonment.
“I submit that the two accused must be sentenced to life. An innocent child was killed and she could have been alive if it was not for greed,” said Ntuli.
Lamont said Zulu's R5,000 bail and Vilakazi's R3,000 bail would be withdrawn, as they were now prisoners of the State.
He sentenced them each to life imprisonment for murder, and 15 years for abduction, which will run concurrently.
After sentencing, Zulu asked the court for mercy. “I am very hurt; I also feel pain about this, but I do not know anything about it. I ask the court to exercise mercy on me because I do not know anything,” she said.
Outside court, Dimakatso Shabangu's mother, Goodness Sihle Mahlalela, said the two got what they deserved.
“I am feeling better with the judgment, but I wish... the court (had) not acquitted the other accused,” she said.
On Wednesday, one of the accused, Thabile Mnisi, 33, was acquitted because there was not enough evidence against her.
Sapa http://www.iol.co.za/news/crime-courts/child-s-muti-killers-get-life-sentences-1.1658232#.UxoADM6hatM
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previous muthi convictions in this area:
Previous conviction in this area: Floyd Mokoene, son Toto and friend Justice Ndubane, Bushbuckridge: slaughtered Floyd's newphew Clarence Brown on
15 August 20 to live-harvest his body parts for 'good luck medicine'.
http://www.sapsjournalonline.gov.za/dynamic/journal_dynamic.aspx?pageid=414&jid=10428
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Probe reveals price of body parts for muti
April 3 2010 By Candice Bailey The Cape Argus. South African witchdoctors are paying as little as R10,000 for a body brought to them to use in the concoction of muti.
Discovering the price for the illicit trade in bodyparts has been a major breakthrough into the study of the clandestine practice.
The information emerged during the second leg of research into trafficking of body parts, undertaken by Mozambique's Human Rights League, supported by Childline in South Africa.
League project manager Simon Fellows said this week that the project was providing the most comprehensive study into the trafficking of body parts, with even more dramatic revelations expected in the months to come.
The information about the price of the body part was received by the sister-in-law of a victim in KZN. The person who was responsible brought the sister-in-law to a shack, where it appears that the mutilation took place.
"You just get the R10,000 for coming with a person, the muti killer reported," said Fellows. "The accused confessed to the family after the family found the body early last year," said Fellows.
The sister-in-law reported that the person's eyes, nipples, clitoris and tongue had been cut off. But Fellows said the revelation was just the tip of the iceberg.
-- In the first report, researchers received 31 people with first-hand accounts of trafficking for body parts. The first project only looked at areas in Mpumalanga, Limpopo and Free State.
-- The new project looks at the entire country. "We have only just started the next part of the project and already we have 42 first-hand accounts," said Fellows.
And their initial finding was that KwaZulu-Natal was turning out to be a trafficking hotbed.
Earlier this year, the Saturday Star reported that one in five people in South Africa's rural areas had had first-hand experience of a human body part being trafficked after a muti killing.
According to Human Rights League's research, of the body parts mentioned in their accounts male genitals, breasts, hearts, fingers and tongues were the most commonly listed.
Of the more than 413 individuals who attended workshops for the research report, 22 percent of those who were willing to be interviewed had seen a mutilated body with parts missing or a body part separated from a body.
There were 72 accounts relating to the trafficking of body parts mentioned in the report. Of these, 27 were from South Africa.
Between the two countries, 19 different body parts were mentioned as missing from bodies. They included heads, female genital organs, breasts, tongues, ears, eyes, hands, legs, lungs, guts, skin, arms, jaws, lips and fingers.
What remained challenging, though, said Fellows, was establishing where body parts were trafficked to.
"Based on the accounts we received, there is internal trafficking and cross-border trafficking, but it is difficult to establish where the body parts are going. There is talk in SA that witchdoctors come in from outside."
There is one case that the league had had some success in - in Mozambique, where a 10-year-old was mutilated. Two men were arrested. They made full confessions but later retracted them.
What was evident from the men was that the body parts were taken from Mozambique to supply a Mozambican witchdoctor operating in South Africa. Fellows said the veil of secrecy that shrouded the industry was because muti killings were still perceived as a taboo subject."We have not been able to find any arrested people who are willing to talk about why its done and where its taken and who its for."
Research has shown that a supply of body parts is coming from Mozambique. "It could be that security at SA's outgoing borders are more stringent," said Fellows.
http://www.iol.co.za/news/south-africa/probe-reveals-price-of-body-parts-for-muti-1.479377#.UxnsPs6hatM
Human Rights League in Mozambique Insists that Trafficking in Human Organs is Real
November 06, 2006 The Mozambican Human Rights League (LDH) has revived claims that trafficking in human organs is a reality in the country, but now says it is done, not through exporting the organs themselves, but through trafficking in human beings who are still alive. LDH chairperson Alice Mabota admitted that there is no clear evidence for trafficking in human organs in the normal sense of the term, which would imply extraction of the organs, storage and later export under carefully controlled conditions.
Instead, she claimed, this is achieved through the trafficking in children, who are taken abroad where they are used for various purposes, such as organ transplants, prostitution and child labour, among others.
She was speaking at a ceremony launching the delayed 2004 issue of the LDH's annual report on Human Rights in Mozambique.
She alleged that the trafficking in children is still continuing, and this is "a very profitable business", but had no figures to back up these assertions.
She said that the 2005/06 edition of the report, to be launched by mid-2007, will include data indicating how serious this problem is in Mozambique.
The report declares that trafficking in people and human organs needs "special treatment" on the part of the government, including "research to determine the motivations for such practices".
But, despite the more moderate line taken by Mabota at the launch ceremony, the report itself rehashes the entirely discredited claims of trafficking in body parts made in 2003 and 2004 against a white South African investor, Gary O'Connor and his Danish wife Tania Skytte.
The couple ran a poultry project in the northern province of Nampula. The sole source for this was a Brazilian"fantasist", Elilda dos Santos, a catholic lay missionary, living at the time in the Mater Dei convent, which the LDH report admits is the only civil society body in Nampula that it bothered to contact. Dos Santos was exposed as a fraud by the weekly paper "Savana" in March 2004, yet the LDH report, published over two years later, still leans heavily on her unsubstantiated claims in order to make libellous allegations against O'Connor - such as the utterly fantastic suggestion that light planes landed at Nampula airport to pick up human organs from his farm.
The report fails to mention that behind the assault on O'Connor's reputation lay a dispute over land.
Self- styled "community leaders" had helped themselves to some of the land that lay within the concession that the government had granted to O'Connor's company, GETT.
They were illegally renting the land out to peasant farmers. Among the witnesses whom Elilda dos Santos claimed could testify to the supposedly macabre behaviour of O'Connor were four of these "community leaders" whose racket had come to an end. It is a shame the LDH did not ask certain other catholic figures in Nampula what they thought of the Brazilian - such as Mario Maloquiha, the priest at Namaita parish, where dos Santos once worked, who declared she had "no credibility whatever", or the Italian priest Guiseppe Brunelli, who dismissed the stories of organ trafficking as "missionary fiction".
Demented stories about investors trafficking in human organs will clearly detract from the rest of the LDH report, much of which looks at genuine police abuses, including cases of torture and summary execution.
Among these incidents of police brutality is the case of Domingos Dausse, who was hospitalised for 48 days, after a savage beating by policmen in Nharitanda, in the western province of Tete, simply because he was not carrying an identity card.
The case went to local prosecutors in August 2004, but it seems that by the time the report was printed no measures had been taken against the police officers involved.
The LDH comments that in most cases, when members of the police force commit such abuses they "go unpunished, even after it has been concluded that they broke the law and the police code of conduct". "This impunity contributes significantly to encouraging certain offenses against innocent citizens", added the report.
As for access to justice, the report says that there is no guarantee, because fine words on the matter have not been followed by measures to improve access to justice on the part of the public.
Adapted from: "Mozambique: LDH Insists That Trafficking in Human Organs is Real." Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique (Maputo). 25 October 2006.
http://www.humantrafficking.org/updates/454 http://allafrica.com/stories/200610250535.html![]()
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