Pretoria - The Gauteng High Court, Pretoria, has heard evidence of how the police retrieved a body wrapped in two curtains and black refuse bags from a pit toilet in Brazzaville near Atteridgeville.
It was later established that the body was that of 14-year-old Keleabetse (Kele) Seleka.
The teenager went missing on November 28, 2016, exactly a month before her body was found.
Her hands and feet were tied together with wire. A black shoelace had been tied around her neck.
This was the evidence of Sergeant Lebohang Monareng, who was at the time the investigating officer in the case.
It emerged that Kele left her parental home in Centurion by taxi and went to Brazzaville to find her “blesser”. She had reacted to a post on Facebook, where a man who had described himself as a “blesser” called on “curvaceous” young women to visit him to be “blessed”.
The blesser turned out to be John Lekubu, 31, who is facing an array of charges, including murder, with his co-accused Tebogo Mabulana, 32, Lesole Mashao, 26 and Eugene Machete, 24, all of Brazzaville.
All four pleaded not guilty to the killing and dumping of the body. Lekubu, who sat far apart from his co-accused in the dock, said, however, he saw this three neighbours strangle Kele.
He claimed that he heard her screams and he peeped through a hole in the shack to see what was going on.
According to him two of his co-accused held Kele down, while the other strangled her with a shoelace.
He also admitted that he was the blesser who had placed the notice on Facebook, but he said this was because Mabulana was looking for a girlfriend. Lekubu said that when the girl arrived at his home, he immediately took her to Mabulana.
However, later that night after he witnessed the strangling, he saw the three walk towards the pit toilet with a heavy bag on their shoulders.
Sergeant Monareng testified that after Lekubu’s arrest, the latter told him he had invited the “child” to his home through his blesser post.
He planned to spend the evening with her, but he abandoned the plan when he realised his wife would be home.
He then took her to his neighbours, where he said she was manhandled by them. Monareng said Lekubu took him to the pit toilet, where the body was dumped.
According to Monareng, he saw something resembling a body deep down in the toilet, but the structure had to be demolished before they could get to it.
“When we retrieved the wrapped body, it was covered in flies and the stench was terrible. We could not establish then whether it was a male or a female.”
The next day during the autopsy it was established that it was the body of a young female, tied-up with plastic coated electrical wire.
The body was so decomposed that DNA tests had to be done to establish that it was Kele.
Monareng said the toilet where the body was found was about 15m away from the shack where the accused lived.
Several family members in the public gallery sobbed loudly as the police officer described the state the body was in.
Kele’s mother, Florence Seleka, last week testified how the frantic family searched for her for a month before the body was discovered.
This was only after the family had appointed their own private investigator, who handed his findings over to the police.
(Proceeding)
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