The motives of the 14-year-old girl from Tzaneen, Limpopo, who filed a fake kidnapping case are still unknown.
The teen faces perjury charges and is expected to appear before the Tzaneen Magistrate’s Court once she and her family have consulted a social worker.
Tzaneen teen fakes a kidnapping and gets hit with perjury
According to police spokesperson Brigadier Motlafela Mojapelo, the teen opened a kidnapping case at the Tzaneen police station on Friday 25 September 2020.
In her statement, the 14-year-old told a story about how her friend was snatched by unknown suspects driving in a white panel van.
“The teenager informed the police that she and her friend, a learner at Meridian College in Tzaneen, were walking from school when unknown suspects driving in a white panel van grabbed her friend and forced her inside the vehicle,” Brig Mojapelo revealed in a statement.
Due to the severity of the claims, in a climate where gender-based violence (GBV) is deemed a national crisis, Tzaneen authorities piled every bit of resource at hand to locate the white van involved in the alleged kidnapping.
What motivated her to open a fake case?
However, it didn’t take long to realise that something was amiss in the teen’s story.
“The matter was prioritised and duly treated with urgency only to establish that the case was based on a fabricated story. Preliminary investigations revealed that there was never a kidnapping and she was not even with a friend,” Mojapelo added.
The girl, still a minor in the eyes of the law, was cuffed and temporarily held in police custody. She was then released into the care of her parents and the matter will be taken to court once a social worker has conducted an assessment on the teen to figure out what drove her to make such a claim.