Pretoria - A Soweto woman has appeared in the High Court in Johannesburg, accused of killing a mother, Nonhlakanipho Lukhozi, and kidnapping and presenting her to relatives as her child.
The indictment seen by IOL states that Nelisiwe Thwala had sold her newborn child to unknown people, before she went on to brutally murder Lukhozi and steal her three-months-old son.
News24 reported that the gruesome murder and subsequent kidnapping happened in 2019. Nelisiwe Thwala had been on the run, but her alleged co-perpetrator, Xolani Mkhize was arrested.
Thwala is also accused of kidnapping Lukhozi’s minor child on 10 June 2019, after killing the child’s mother.
The minor child’s name is known to IOL but is withheld to protect them.
The indictment states that after murdering the nursing mother, Nelisiwe Thwala and her boyfriend dumped the corpse in the veld and took the child home as theirs.
“The accused and her co-perpetrator (Thwala and Mkhize) proceeded to the accused’s (Thwala) parental home at Tshepisong with the deceased’s minor child.
Thwala is additionally charged with human trafficking with human trafficking for harbouring the minor victim “by means of fraud, deception, by threat of harm or threat of use of force or other forms of coercion and/or by abusing the position of vulnerability and/or the abuse of power for the purposes of making people believe” that the child was hers.
Thwala is also facing charges of defeating the administration of justice in that she cleaned the crime scene to conceal the murder of Lukhozi, “and making it appear as if she went missing whereas in fact the accused (Thwala) and her co-perpetrator had killed her and dumped her body in the veld”.
According to the indictment, after murdering Lukhozi, Thwala and Mkhize put her body in a wheelie bin and dumped her body in the veld nearby.
“The accused and her co-perpetrator (Thwala and Mkhize) proceeded to the accused’s (Thwala) parental home at Tshepisong with the deceased’s minor child. There, they introduced the deceased’s child that had been sold by the accused to unknown persons,” the indictment reads.
Lukhozi’s cause of death has been determined to be “multiple blunt stab wounds to the neck and chest, ligature strangulation and blunt force injuries”.
Mkhize was arrested on 23 June 2019 and he has already been convicted and sentenced.
Thwala had remained on the run, until she was arrested in October last year.
News24 reported that after Thwala sold her child, she kicked her out with a condition that she could only return home with the child she had sold.
IOL