ONE of three men sentenced to life imprisonment in June for the rape of two Belgian tourists has been refused leave to challenge his conviction and sentence by the Appeal Court in Bloemfontein. John Tee and two other men were found guilty by the Port Elizabeth High Court in June of raping two women to whom they had offered a lift from Port Elizabeth to Plettenberg Bay on April 3. They were all sentenced to life imprisonment. The women were hitchhiking on the N2 highway and were picked up by Tee, Donovan van Rooyen and Benjamin Dirk in a bakkie. The bakkie pulled off near the Storms River, where one of the women was raped four times and the other twice. One of the women was based in Plettenberg Bay as a social worker doing humanitarian work for the town’s under-privileged community.