Thabo Bester, a rapist, and killer who fled from a South African prison by faking his own death has been apprehended in Tanzania. He went missing for a year after it was believed he committed himself by setting fire to his prison cell.
Last month, a manhunt was initiated for Thabo Bester after a new post-mortem investigation confirmed that the body was not his. Bester was apprehended with his girlfriend and a third suspect on Friday and will be deported to South Africa. According to police, the trio planned to flee into adjacent Kenya.
Thabo Bester is known as the ‘Facebook rapist’ because he lures his victims through the social networking site. He was convicted in 2012 of raping and killing his model lover Nomfundo Tyhulu. He had been convicted of raping and robbing two other women a year before.
He was reported dead in his cell at the Mangaung Correctional Centre in the city of Bloemfontein in May after apparently setting himself on fire. However, late last year, local media began to cast doubt on Bester’s death.
Police launched a new murder inquiry in March when additional testing revealed that the body was not Thabo Bester – and that the unnamed person died from blunt-force injuries to the head.
Employees of G4S, the British-owned security firm that administered the prison where Thabo Bester was kept, have been accused of assisting him in fleeing. According to the company, three employees were fired as a result of the incident. Earlier this week, representatives from the company failed to show up for a parliamentary hearing on Bester’s escape.
The escape of Thabo Bester caused uproar in South Africa, which has one of the world’s highest rates of sexual assault. There had been numerous reports of Thabo Bester sightings in the last year, including accusations that he was food shopping in an affluent Johannesburg suburb and was living in a rented mansion there.
