Johannesburg - His only regret is having to burden his family with his wife and three children.
And the 21 rapes for which he has been convicted? No.
“Like I said before, I don’t know any of those women,” said Lawrence Bila Mabunda during pre-sentencing in the high court sitting in the Palm Ridge Magistrate’s Court on Monday.
State advocate Shubnum Singh asked Mabunda: “You’re not sorry for raping these women?”
Mabunda, who had said he was “sorry for what happened” while testifying in mitigation of his sentence, said: “I’m not… just sorry to my family that they have to take care of my wife and children.”
“Do you admit that you’re guilty?” Singh asked.
“Yes,” he answered.
“But I’ve said already that I don’t know those women.”
On Friday, Judge Caroline Nicholls convicted him on 21 of the 22 rapes he had been charged with, 13 aggravated robbery charges and an attempted murder charge for stabbing one of his victims with a knife.
Mabunda was acquitted on all 13 kidnapping charges and two firearm-related charges.
He had met most of the women he raped at taxi ranks in Joburg, convincing them they were at the wrong taxi ranks and offering to accompany them to ranks where they could catch their taxis.
He would take them to a bushy area in Benrose and rape them before robbing them.
His first victim was a 28-year-old woman he met at the Noord Street taxi rank in August 2009.
It took another five months before he pounced again, this time, attacking a 22-year-old woman who had just arrived from Mpumalanga to visit her sister and boyfriend.
He offered to take her to the correct place, and the woman, now 27, hopped in and paid the R50 requested taxi fare.
Once all the other passengers had alighted, Mabunda pointed towards some lights.
“There’s the MTN rank,” he had said. But to get there, he would have to park his taxi and walk the woman across the bushes because it was not safe for a woman to walk on her own. She felt uneasy when Mabunda started talking about how he could never rob a woman of R50 like people do in Joburg.
“He then suddenly turned around, grabbed my hand… and with the other hand, he was holding a knife. He then said I should do whatever he wants me to do or he’ll kill me,” the woman testified.
She was ordered to undress and was raped twice.
Singh on Monday called for life imprisonment, saying Mabunda had left his victims humiliated and traumatised.
“The only appropriate sentence is life,” she said, adding that Judge Nicholls should take into consideration Mabunda’s lack of remorse.
His lawyer, advocate Michael Mavhavha Thwala, said Mabunda was a first-time offender and the sole breadwinner for his family.