News:
11 October 2013
Last week Friday, Zacharia Selowa (24) from Mankweng received seven life sentences and 130 years’ imprisonment on 12 counts of rape, five counts of robbery and one of kidnapping in the Mankweng Regional Court.
He attacked and raped eleven University of Limpopo students and a 14-year-old minor just a month after being granted bail for raping a 32-year-old woman.
Between March and October 2012
Selowa would wait for students going home, threaten them with a knife and then force them to the local cemetery before violently raping them and robbing them of their belongings.
Selowa’s victims were 18 and 19 years old. “One of the University students was kidnapped and raped repeatedly for a day before she managed to flee through a window of a disused house.” said police communication officer, Hangwani Mulaudzi.
Convinced that they had a suspect, since the perpetrator was already under their radar, the police obtained an order to acquire DNA from Selowa. The DNA evidence linked Selowa to the 12 rape cases.