Court shows no mercy to KZN serial rapist, saying he must be permanently removed from society

KwaZulu-Natal’s south coast serial rapist has been “permanently removed from society” after kidnapping and raping mostly child and teenage victims during his two-year reign of terror. 

Handing down sentencing in the Scottburgh Regional Court on Thursday, Magistrate Asheena Bacharan said she found there were no mitigating circumstances to deviate from the minimum sentence in the case of Sakhile Bhekisisa Mhlungu, 47, who raped 10 victims, including children aged, 11, 12 and 15, four older teenagers and two women.  

Mhlungu had earlier pleaded guilty to nineteen charges including rape, kidnapping, robbery and discharging a firearm after police collected DNA evidence linking him to the rapes. He committed the crimes between April 2019 and March 2022 when he drove around in his white bakkie and kidnapped teenage girls at gunpoint, before taking them to a secluded spot and raping them.  He was arrested on 3 January 2022.

He earlier begged the court for mercy in sentencing and asked his victims, the court, and his family for forgiveness for his “evil deeds” which he said Satan may have possessed him to commit and had brought “embarrassment” on his family.

“What I wanted to say to the court, to the victims and the families of the victims as well as to my family (is) I am very sorry for what I have done. I am entirely remorseful,” Mhlungu had testified.

His attorney, Leslie Pillay, had argued that Mhlungu had pleaded guilty and not burdened the state with the task of proving the case against him, and that he is the sole breadwinner of his family, which includes three minor children and two unemployed adult children. Pillay also argued that Mhlungu would submit himself to a rehabilitation programme in prison.

However, state prosecutor Active Njakazi had argued in aggravation of sentence that Mhlungu had raped three minors and only pleaded guilty because he had been arrested, and realised he would not be acquitted because of the DNA evidence. He argued that the rapes were premediated as Mhlungu drove around “ambushing young girls,” some of them on their way home from school, and threatened them with a firearm to induce fear.

In handing down sentencing Bacharam said it was a “sad reflection” on society that women and children have been abused and that the abuse continues unabated, and that  their rights require legal protection by way of international conventions and domestic laws.

Reading out segments of victim impact statements submitted to court, Bacharam described how the victims were terrified of encountering Mhlungu again and of going to school and how one family had moved one victim “from house to house” to hide her from him.  One of the victim’s mothers said she believed her daughter had been physically injured permanently because Mhlungu forced her to jump out of his moving vehicle following the rape.

Bacharam said the victims were mocked at school and one 16-year old girl had told the court in her statement that she had also changed her sexuality in that she is “no longer a girl. My body just told me to act like a boy”.

“I will never forgive him for what he did to me. I want you to stay in jail. He can even grow old and die there,” she wrote.

“You changed me from the way I am … now I must act like a boy. I will die like this as a tomboy because I no longer want males. My wish is that this man rots in jail. When I see a car similar to his I get frightened. I run away and hide. Even if I see a gun on the television, I get traumatised and remember what happened to me.”

One of the victim’s mother’s had lost her job because she needed to stay home and care for her daughter, and the girl’s father blamed her mother for the rape. Another victim said that she had lost her faith in God and questioned how He could have remained silent while she was raped.

Bacharam said that despite counselling, which the victims were struggling to access because of the high cost of transport to get to the GJ Crookes Hospital, it was not clear whether they would ever recover completely.

She said the statistics regarding child rape were “indeed scary”, and state prosecutor Active Njakazi had pointed out that Interpol has referred to South Africa as “the rape capital of the world”.

She said crime statistics showed that there were 41 rapes for every 100 000 females in the country in 2021/22.

“The report by the United Nations for the period 1998 to 2000 stated that South Africa was ranked first for rapes per capita. Furthermore, it was also stated that the South African police estimate that a woman in South Africa is raped every 36 seconds. Furthermore, according to the World Population Review, South Africa also has the highest rape rate in the world at 132.4 incidents per 400 000 people,” Bacharam said.

She said women raped in South Africa also had a one in four chance of her attacker being HIV positive.

Bacharam said the court was aware of the requirement to temper justice with mercy but that she was “not convinced that there are substantial and compelling circumstances to deviate from the prescribed sentence of life imprisonment” for the child rapes. 

“Given the totality of the case, which includes the accused’s personal circumstances as well as the circumstances relating to the various interests of society, the only appropriate sentence the court can impose is one of long-term imprisonment to have the effect to permanently remove the accused from society. In cases like this, retribution and deterrence comes to the fore while rehabilitation plays a relatively small role,” Bacharam said.

She sentenced Mhlungu to three terms of life imprisonment for the child rapes as well as to prison sentences of 10 to 15 years each for the rapes and attempted rapes of the older teenagers and women. 

He was also sentenced to additional three-year prison sentences for each of the other charges including kidnapping and discharging of a fireman, which will run concurrently to the longer sentences.

Bacharam also declared Mhlunu unfit to possess a firearm and ordered that he be listed in both the Sexual Offenders Register and the Child Protection Register.