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A parliamentary committee probing the escape of notorious Facebook rapist and murderer Thabo Bester was left with more questions than answers when officials of the prison where Bester escaped responded with limited accountability.
Day two of the hearings brought inquiries on employee liability and incentivisation.
Bester and his romantic partner, Dr Nandipha Magudumana, were extradited from Tanzania on Thursday morning, and correctional services officials say he is being held at the Kgosi Mampuru II Correctional Centre in Pretoria.
READ: Thabo Bester posed as an American
Bester, Magudumana and a Mozambican accomplice were captured in Arusha, Tanzania, for illegally entering the country. The department of correctional services publicised his escape almost a year after the incident. Bester was convicted in 2012 for the rape and murder of model and his then girlfriend Nomfundo Tyhulu. A year later, he was charged with the rape and robbery of two other women.
His escape from the G4S-operated Mangaung Correctional Centre (MCC) in Bloemfontein, Free State, on May 3 2022, involved a fire in his cell. Officials believed the deceased remains to be Bester’s and deemed the incident a suicide.
PC briefing on Thabo Bester - JICS timeline:
African Christian Democratic Party MP Steven Swart considered if the roughly R1 million penalty which MCC would face for a prison escape incentivised prison officials to keep the case under wraps for so long.
He said:
G4S care and justice services director Gert Beyleveld countered that there lies no difference between the penalties for a suicide case with negligence and an escape case.
Even so, the circumstances surrounding Bester’s escape and the failure of prison officials and officers to identify the body properly are ambiguous at best.
Swart questioned why the height difference between the 1.7m-tall Bester and the 1.45m-tall corpse did not seem odd to officials who responded to the scene.
“There’s a big difference,” Swart said. “At first glance, the wardens who came to that cell would’ve known the person who was burnt there wasn’t Mr Bester.”
READ: Health council to probe allegations levelled against Dr Nandipha Magudumana
While the position of the police department could not be ascertained at the time of questioning, G4S regional commercial director Cobus Groenewoud said that fire extinguisher residue made it difficult to ascertain the body’s height.
The night of the incident, the SA Police Service (SAPS) began investigating what was assumed to be Bester’s suicide. It was only on May 25 that the police notified MCC of the investigation turning criminal.
While he admitted to there being close cooperation between the SAPS and MCC, Groenewoud said the correctional facility could not partake in the criminal investigation, instead only complying with the SAPS processes, which centred on video footage research and staff interviews.
She listed three other non-black MCC officials who were present on the day of the incident, but who were not charged.
Beyleveld replied that two of the three other employees were not found to have any involvement with the incident, and the third was not working in their current role on the date of the fire.
Frustrations mounted on the point of G4S’ culpability in the prison escape. DA MP Glynnis Breytenbach asked questions pertaining to how the body was moved in and out of the prison, and eventually to cell 35 where it was set alight, to which Beyleveld responded that the answer remained unclear.
READ: Editorial | Bester: too little, too late
Later in the session, ANC MP and chairperson of the portfolio committee of justice and correctional services Bulelani Magwanishe asked the G4S representatives what they believed the public opinion to be of their company, given their unsatisfactory answers.
Magwanishe said:
