FREE State Premier Winkie Direko has expressed shock at the arrest of the speaker of the province’s legislature on murder charges, SABC radio news reported on Sunday. Joe Mafereka was arrested on Saturday at Johannesburg International Airport by members of the Special Investigation Unit on murder charges related to taxi violence in 1989. Before joining […]

POLICE in Florida, west of Johannesburg, were searching on Monday for a 62-year-old man who allegedly sexually abused three of his five children over the course of 20 years. The man apparently fled a flat he had shared with two daughters after his elder daughter laid charges of sexual assault and incest against him. The […]

EGYPT’S high military court on Sunday condemned 15 members of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood to between three and five years in prison for reviving the outlawed movement, the judge announced. Five people were acquitted of the same charges while three were sentenced to five years and 12 got three years. Former member of parliament Mukhtar […]

BOUBKER BELKADI, Algiers | Monday A DELEGATION from Amnesty International has left strife-torn Algeria disappointed at being unable to meet government officials and army officers over rights abuses, a spokesman said. Roger Clark, a Canadian leading the delegation from the human rights organisation, said the group regretted that it could not realise the goals it […]

NORTHERN Cape police have identified the man who died after he was chained to a tree by his neck on a farm in the Kakamas area in the Northern Cape as 38-year-old Adam Smit. Police found Smit’s body on the farm Soetap along with his friend Dawid Klaaste, who survived the ordeal. Two farmworkers – […]

A FIVE-year-old East London boy died and his 40-year-old mother was critically ill after they apparently ate a poisonous plant with their lunch on Saturday, Eastern Cape police said on Sunday. Inspector John Fobian, of the police’s disaster management team, said Riando Mashabalala, 5, and his mother Yoliswa from Needs Camp had picked what they […]

HUGH NEVILL, Johannesburg | Monday SOUTH Africa’s top government labour official has ordered a clampdown on dangerous working conditions following the fiery deaths of 11 night-shift workers locked into in a Johannesburg chemicals factory. “Employers who do not adhere to occupational health safety regulations should expect a zero tolerance approach from the department, which will […]

A 13-year-old girl has gone to police in northeastern Ethiopia with a case against her family and prospective husband to avoid a forced marriage, Ethiopia’s news agency ENA reported. Sarah Mohamed, who lives in the Dessie district of the ethnic Amhara Wollo region, lodged a complaint with police, saying she had repeatedly told her family […]

TWO farmers were murdered in separate attacks on farms in Mpumalanga on Thursday, police said. In the first attack, intruders shot Johannes Petrus George Botha, 57, and his wife, Diana Magdalena, 49, while they were asleep around 1am on their farm Rietfontein, near Lydenburg. Johannes Botha died instantly but his wife drove to neighbours for […]

NIGERIAN drugs agents this week set fire to more than six tonnes of narcotics and other drugs with a street value of around $25m, officials said. The 6 162kg of drugs was ere seized at airports and border crossings, the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency said. The agency last month destroyed a large quantity of […]