A woman told the Scottburgh High Court on Wednesday she ”didn’t feel like” she was part of her own body as a man raped her on the KwaZulu-Natal South Coast.
The woman, who may not be identified, said: ”I didn’t feel like I was a part of my body. I wasn’t there. When something like that happens, you switch off.”
The student was the second victim to testify at the trial where Mthokozisi Mbambo (29), Sithembiso Shelembe (23) and Wonder Mchunu (26) are accused of raping her and two friends at a beach house in Pennington, south of Scottburgh, on December 29 last year.
The three men are accused of attacking and robbing a Gauteng couple later that night.
The nervous, quietly spoken woman took a break to compose herself before cross-examination, where it emerged that she had not identified any of the three men at an identification parade in January.
Asked if she could identify her rapist, she said Shelembe had been her attacker.
Advocate Dean Govender asked: ”On the day of the identification parade you could not identify any one. How is it that seven months later you could identify him?”
”The day of the ID parade I was very traumatised; I had to write an exam and then do an ID parade. He was there,” she replied.
Earlier in the day, forensics expert Superintendent Huibrecht Botha told the court that DNA testing of blood samples taken from Shelembe and Mchunu had linked the two men to the rape victims.
Botha explained that according to statistical analysis, it was nearly impossible for the DNA profile of Shelembe and Mchunu to be linked to another person.
”If we go and test 25-trillion black people, we can expect one person to have the same profile [as Shelembe].”
She said there ”were only 6,5-billion people in the world” and from the data maintained on the four main race groups in South Africa, there was only a one in 643-trillion chance of a South African of Indian descent having the same profile, a one in 758-trillion chance of a coloured person having the same DNA profile and a one in 327-trillion chance of a white person having the same profile as the two men.
DNA recovered from saliva on two cigarette butts, a cloth and that retrieved from two of the women matched the DNA taken from Shelembe.
She said it was a ”99,999%” certainty that the DNA was that of Shelembe.
The DNA from Mchunu was retrieved from one of the women. However, Mbambo’s DNA did not match any of the samples sent to the police laboratory in Pretoria.
She said Shelembe’s DNA, which was also found on the cloth, was mixed with another person’s DNA.
In testimony on Tuesday, one of the women testified that she had been raped twice by Shelembe and that after raping her he had wiped himself down.
”He rubbed himself off against it [the cloth] and also wiped me off with it,” she said.
Earlier in the day, defence counsel said the victims had seen pictures of their clients before the identification parade.
This emerged during cross-examination of the woman’s testimony.
Advocate Abdul Khan said: ”He [Mchunu] believes that you had sight of photographs taken of him by Inspector Basil Crouse and other policemen.”
”I did not see such photographs before the line up or after the line up,” the woman replied.
On Tuesday she testified that each time she objected to being kissed by Shelembe while she was being raped for a second time, Shelembe pressed a silver Smith and Wesson revolver to her head.
Govender questioned the procedures surrounding the identification parade.
The young woman described how she had ”almost immediately” identified Shelembe at the identification parade in early January. — Sapa