A Port Elizabeth man is recovering from a horrific ordeal in which he was forced to watch a woman being repeatedly raped and, severely injured after being stoned and stabbed, he had to crawl through salt pans to seek help, Eastern Cape police said.
The man, Salvadore Bambi, in his 20s, was sitting in a vehicle with a 22-year-old woman outside the Cleary Park shopping centre in Gelvandale on Friday night when two men with knives got into their car, Superintendent Johann van Greunen said on Monday.
They forced the two to drive to Missionvale and, while the car was moving, raped the woman. The car then ran out of petrol near salt pans and the men ordered the two out of the car and told them to walk in the direction of Missionvale. Then they tied the man up and forced him to watch as they each raped the woman again.
Van Greunen said that this ”continued the whole night” and just before 5am they tried to kill Bambi with stones and rocks.
”He said he was in so much pain that he pleaded with them to rather stab him,” Van Greunen said.
The men then stabbed him in the face twice, once on the back of the head and once in his hand. Van Greunen said the details were not clear but later Bambi managed to escape into the salt pan and swam, crawled and staggered to the nearby old Bethelsdorp road where a passing motorist saw him and took him to the Livingstone Hospital in a serious condition.
Hospital staff contacted the police who managed to get a few details out of the shocked man and launched a search for the woman and the two attackers. The woman’s body was found at about 7pm on Saturday evening. She had been stabbed 10 times in the face, and her throat had been slit.
However, Van Greunen said that information supplied by the man enabled them to arrest two men, one in his 30s and the other in his early 20s, and both would appear in the Port Elizabeth Magistrate’s Court on Monday.
They face charges of abduction, rape, assault and murder. Bambi’s condition was stable, Van Greunen said. – Sapa