A 20-year-old man accused of raping a two-year-old girl and charged with three counts of assault was found guilty of all charges in the Grahamstown High Court on Thursday.
Judge Johan Froneman rejected the evidence of Thulani Jafta (20), of Madukeni Sada, Cathcart, as ”inherently improbable and contrived”.
Froneman found that Jafta had raped the girl at her mother’s house on a farm near Cathcart on September 9 last year. Jafta was also found guilty of assaulting a man and two women who intervened to try to protect the child.
Sentencing was postponed until April 22 for a pre-sentence report from a social worker.
Citing the evidence of the state witnesses, Froneman said they had banged on the window after hearing the child crying.
”Their credibility is not in doubt in that they all corroborated the fact that the accused had locked himself in the room with the girl, and undressed her. No material criticism can be directed against the state witnesses; even if there were minor differences, nothing turns on this.
”The accused’s evidence was inherently improbable and contrived. Further, his claim that they [state witnesses] conspired to implicate him cannot hold.”
Froneman said the accused’s explanation of how he was caught with the child was also inherently improbable, and he had no hesitation of rejecting it as ”entirely false”.
Jafta, in his evidence, claimed the girl asked him to undress her because she had to go to the toilet.
”Based on the evidence before me, there is no other possibility that the girl was molested by anyone else other than the accused,” Froneman concluded. — Sapa