The State delivered a strong objection to Nandipha Magudumana’s bail application, citing several gob-smacking findings from a criminal investigation into her alleged role in the Thabo Bester prison break.
Court hears how Nandipha Magudumana used corpses to help Thabo Bester escape
According to state prosecutor Advocate Sello Matlhoko, not only was Magudumana not the victim she portrayed in her affidavit, which placed Bester as the aggressor who allegedly abducted and forced her to flee to Tanzania, but she had every reason to use the bail to escape from several active fraud cases.
In her affidavit, Magudumana pleaded with the court to grant her R10 000 bail so she could return to her children and assume her motherly responsibilities, while also re-establishing her cosmetic surgery business.
The disgraced doctor listed a Sandton property belonging to a fellow medical practitioner as her temporary place of residence and vowed she had no reason to flee the country, considering she was a mother of two and had several personal interests in South Africa.
However, in a detailed response, Advocate Matlhoko submitted a resounding rebuttal to Magudumana’s affidavit and for the first time since she and her lover, a convicted murderer and serial rapist, were arrested in April 2023, the court heard a summary of the state’s case against the disgraced doctor and 11 co-accused.
In an affidavit written and signed by the lead investigator in Bester’s prison break, Lieutenant-Colonel Teboho Flyman, a detailed timeline emerged highlighting Magudumana’s movements in allegedly aiding a convicted murderer and rapist in not only faking his death but also practically walking out of a super-max correctional facility.
Magudumana shopped around for corpses to use as decoys in Bester’s prison break
Matlhoko, reading Lt-Col Flyman’s affidavit revisited several facts pertaining to Magudumana’s role in Bester’s prison break, in a bid to discredit the doctor’s assertions that she was an involuntary participant in the crimes she and the 11 co-accused allegedly committed.
Based on the merits of the state’s case, Magudumana and Bester were identified as masterminds in the latter’s escape, which took place on 3 May 2022.
A prolonged investigation into the case found that Magudumana acted willingly in:
- collecting an unidentified body from the state mortuary in Bloemfontein, on 7 April 2022, “under the false pretence that the body was that of her father, Zingisa Magadla”; and
- arranging a funeral and burial of the body in the wee hours of 8 April 2022 (a year later, police discovered Magudumana had allegedly stuffed the coffin with rotten meat inside the coffin).
Also, on three occasions, between late March and mid-April 2022, Magudumana booked into an unnamed boutique hotel in Bloemfontein, and records listed a TK Nkwana as the person who settled the bills. Of course, subsequent investigations found that this was one of Bester’s many aliases he used while in prison.
For reasons not yet canvassed in court, the body Magudumana claimed in April 2022 was discovered floating in the Kopano Nokeng River, in Bloemfontein.
That John Doe, Advocate Matlhoko emphasised, “is still at [the state] mortuary waiting to be claimed.”
Magudumana was also listed as the lead roleplayer in falsely claiming the body of Katlego Bereng from the national hospital in Bloemfontein, on 23 April 2022.
This time, evidence shows Magudumana allegedly enlisted the assistance of Accused 9, Zanda Moyo, who, at the time, was the disgraced doctor’s gardener, to remove Bereng’s corpse.
According to lead investigator Lt-Col Flyman, on 27 April 2023, a Katlego Nkwana, another one of Bester’s aliases, rented a vehicle for Magudumana’s father Zolile Sekeleni to collect. Coincidentally, this rental vehicle was used two days later to smuggle Bereng’s corpse into Mangaung Prison, where Bester was held.
While Magudumana and her 11 co-accused were not charged with Bereng’s murder, the state emphasised the disgraced doctor played a central role in orchestrating the complex smuggling of the corpse from the national hospital to a prison workshop, then into Bester’s cell on 3 May 2022, where it was torched as the first act in the convicted murderer and rapist’s daring prison escape.
A paper trail shows Nandipha Magudumana fought to claim Bereng’s body
Advocate Matlhoko revealed that, two days after Bester escaped from Mangaung Prison, on 5 May 2022, Magudumana, in the company of her father, Sekeleni, brazenly claimed the charred corpse found inside the Facebook Rapist’s cell.
“In claiming this body, the applicant submitted an affidavit dated 5 May 2022, commissioned at Polokwane, to a G4S official, wherein she declared the deceased to be her partner, who has no other relatives,” Matlhoko stated.
Records also showed Magudumana arranged for the decoy body to be transported to Gauteng for cremation and hours before she and Bester pulled off the perfect act of erasing one’s entire existence (you will recall Bester had no formal South African ID and was until recently, not listed in Home Affairs’ national registry), SAPS received a preliminary report listing Bereng’s cause of death as blunt force trauma.
This discovery prompted an investigation into the arson incident inside Bester’s cell, which, in the end, culminated in the epiphany that the Facebook Rapist had attempted to fake his own death.
Magudumana’s matter is set to resume on Wednesday, 30 August 2023, when the Bloemfontein Magistrate’s Court is expected to deliver judgment on the disgraced doctor’s bail application.
