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Delores Cyster, from Freedom Park in Mitchells Plain, hugs her daughter Johnica, who she met on Friday for the first time since she was snatched as a child 18 years ago by her babysitters. Picture: Leon Lestrade

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• Child found after 18 years

WARDA MEYER

EIGHTEEN agonising years of searching for her missing child ended yesterday when a Mitchells Plain mother hugged her daughter close, crying tears of joy, in a miraculous reunion.

Johnica Ambral, as she is now known, was just two years old when she was kidnapped in 1993. But her anguished mother Delores Cyster, of Freedom Park, never stopped begging and pleading with police to help find her.

The almost two decades-old mystery had a happy ending yesterday

, not a moment too soon for the mother and daughter, who first made contact the day before Christmas. But Johnica was in Port Elizabeth, her mother in Cape Town, and lack of funds continued to keep them apart for several more agonising weeks.

“The moment I saw her, I knew that the pain and suffering was worth it. God brought us back together,” Cyster said yesterday, with nothing but praise for the generosity of donors who responded to a Weekend Argus story on Christmas Eve.

Johnica, now 21 and herself a mother of two, arrived on a bus from Port Elizabeth in the early hours yesterday. She had not seen her mother since she was snatched by Phillip and Johanna Ambral, a couple her mother paid to care for her. They snatched her in July 1993, and disappeared without a trace.

In December, Johnica made the shocking discovery that the people she had grown up with had actually stolen her. She had spent the previous two decades living as part of a family that wasn’t hers.

She said the lies and deceit, coupled with the stress of having to come to terms with a new identity, had made her even more eager to get to know her mother and her newfound siblings.

Johnica’s kidnapping left Cyster shattered:

“Johnica was supposed to sleep over on the Friday night and I was going to fetch her after work the next day. But when I arrived they were gone… just packed up and left… no note, no warning, nothing.”

The break in the case came at the end of last year when a policeman from the Family Violence, Child Protection and Sexual Offences Unit, who took pity on Cyster, took just two weeks to find Johnica in Port Elizabeth.

But Warrant Officer Nicholas du Plessis said he merely followed up information, and an old address provided by Cyster.

Within those weeks he established that the couple who took Johnica had both died, the man four years ago and the woman last year.

Cyster first spoke to her daughter about a week ago when police deemed that a DNA test was no longer necessary because Johnica’s identity was not in dispute.

Cyster said of that first call to Johnica:

“My child couldn’t stop crying over the phone, which made it even harder that we were being kept apart due to our financial circumstances.”

But she added that she had since realised that “there’s still a lot of good in this world” when people offered to pay for Johnica’s trip to Cape Town.

Cyster said she could barely speak when she finally laid eyes on Johnica and her two grandchildren yesterday.

“It’s a wonderful feeling. Now I can sleep at night.”

She said she’d never given up looking for her, and admitted that when Johnica fell asleep yesterday, she’d kept checking she was still there, really sleeping in her bed.

“She’s my miracle. I finally have my baby back. The pain and agony is finally over,” Cyster said.

Johnica told Weekend Argus she never knew that the people she called mom and dad were not her real parents.

“They treated me well. They looked after me and cared for me, but I never suspected that I was not their child.”

When police told her the truth, she hadn’t wanted to believe it.

“But now I know it’s true.”

She recalls always asking who she looked like, and being told she resembled her mother – “but we looked nothing alike”.

When she finally talked to Cyster on the phone, “all I knew was that I had to be with her”, said Johnica.

warda.meyer@inl.co.za - Weeken Argus