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State says Magudumana wanted to return to her children, lied about being 'abducted' by SA cops

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State says Magudumana wanted to return to her children, lied about being 'abducted' by SA cops

30th May 2023

By: News24Wire

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Dr Nandipha Magudumana – who claims she was "abducted" by South African police in Tanzania after allegedly helping her rapist killer boyfriend Thabo Bester escape from prison – told "all and sundry" she wanted to return to South Africa to see her children, the State says.

"[Magudumana] was never arrested, as stated, nor was she handcuffed at any point before or during the flight from Tanzania to the Republic of South Africa by the SAPS. [Magudumana] is being utterly untruthful with the allegations that she was blindfolded or abducted," SAPS Brigadier Richard Abednego Shibiri has told the Free State High Court in Bloemfontein.

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In an urgent application filed earlier this month, Magudumana claimed that she had been unlawfully arrested and "blindfolded" by SA police after being apprehended with Bester – and contended that the criminal proceedings against her were therefore a "nullity".

News24 has established that the doctor, who stands accused of falsely claiming multiple bodies to assist Bester to fake his own death in May last year, will be represented by top international law advocate Anton Katz SC when she pursues her case for immediate release on Thursday. 

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While the State is adamant that Magudumana's application is built on serious misrepresentation and dishonesty, it is understood that law enforcement authorities are preparing to rearrest her on a fresh warrant, in the event that she succeeds.

Shibiri maintains, as Home Affairs Minister Aaron Motsoaledi did in an earlier press conference, that Magudumana and Bester were legally deported from Tanzania, where they had fled after Bester's escape from the maximum-security Mangaung Correctional Centre was finally confirmed.

"The deportation of [Magudumana] from Tanzania, at the behest of the Tanzanian government, was not in breach of international law or the comity between South Africa and Tanzania.

"Deportation is a unilateral act of the deporting State. The government of Tanzania was within its rights to deport Bester and [Magudumana] in accordance with its law. In this instance, South Africa was preliminarily engaged to ascertain the country of origin. The process was purely a deportation," he says.

According to Shibiri, Magudumana's deportation occurred after she was declared "a prohibited immigrant" under the provisions of Tanzania's Immigration Act. Neither she nor Bester, who was travelling with a fake American passport, had legally crossed into Tanzania, the State alleges.

Tanzania's Immigration Act states that: "Subject to the provisions of this Act, any immigration officer or any police officer may prevent any prohibited immigrant from entering Tanzania and may, without a warrant, arrest any prohibited immigrant or any person who he has reasonable cause to suspect of having entered Tanzania while being a prohibited immigrant otherwise that in accordance with the provisions of this Act."

Shibiri maintains that Magudumana's status as "a prohibited immigrant" meant that it was not legally required for her to be brought before a magistrate in Tanzania. Instead, he says, Tanzanian immigration law enabled authorities to keep her in custody until she was transported out of the country through a ship, plane or other vessel.

The senior police official – who was part of the delegation who went to Tanzania after Bester and Magudumana were apprehended – has also given evidence that, when Magudumana was handed over to Department of Home Affairs officials in Tanzania in the presence of the SA High Commissioner to Tanzania, "she did not, be it verbally or otherwise, offer any resistance or protest". 

He added that she "informed all and sundry that she wanted to return to South Africa to her children". 

Shibiri said the SA delegation in Tanzania was also informed that Bester and Magudumana had "entered and remained in Tanzania without legal documentation and were thus not legally in Tanzania". 

He added: 

In this regard, so the delegation was informed, [Magudumana’s] passport did not have entry stamps which are, as a matter of procedure, appended to an immigrant's passport at the time of arriving at a port of entry to Tanzania.

The police and NPA remain adamant that Magudumana was not arrested by SA police in Tanzania, but was actually only arrested when she landed at the Lanseria Airport. 

Shibiri further contends that there are "conspicuous gaps" in Magudumana's "version of events", including how she got to Tanzania in the first place, if she entered the country legally, why she was there, and where exactly she had been "arrested" by SA police. 

"[Magudumana] elected not to disclose these details to the court, not because they are irrelevant, but because they are harmful to her case, which is in material respect and to a large extent, based, with respect due, on misrepresentation of facts," he said.

He further maintains that her account of the events that played out after she and Bester were apprehended by Tanzanian police is "not true". 

"The summary of facts establish that [Magudumana] is not afraid to make false statements", he says, before stating that the doctor’s claims that there were SA National Defence Force officials on the flight that returned her to South Africa are baseless.

"Nobody 'flanked' [Magudumana] in the sense that she conveys. There were only a limited number of seats on the airplane," he states.

According to Shibiri, the police who were on that plane were accompanying the home affairs department officials tasked with overseeing the deportation of Magudumana and Bester because of his status as a convicted rapist and killer.

"These SAPS members did not travel to Tanzania to arrest [Magudumana]," he said.

Shibiri, on behalf of the National Prosecuting Authority and the police, has also questioned whether Magudumana's application was even urgent, given that she had been arrested in April and remained in detention since then. The state has asked that the Free State High Court in Bloemfontein "strike" the case from the roll because of this lack of urgency.

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