It was about to be a perfect escape. On May 3, 2022, a charred corpse was found in a cell following a freak fire at the Mangaung maximum security prison in central South Africa. When the identity of the deceased was known, the news covered the main media in the African country: the dead man was Thabo Bester, known as the Facebook rapist because he used that social network to attract his victims, beautiful and very young women whom he promised to mediate with bookers or international model discoverers.
In 2012, a Cape Town judge was not fooled by the good manners and expensive clothes of that handsome and wealthy young man. He sentenced Bester to life in prison for the murder of his girlfriend, model Nomfundo Tyhulu, and for at least three rapes.
Less than a year ago, his life and criminal record appeared to be abruptly ended by the flames in his cell in what was initially reported to be a suicide. With one caveat: it was a lie. Bester was arrested last Friday in Tanzania, where he was on the run with his current girlfriend, a popular doctor with hundreds of thousands of followers on social networks, and a Mozambican friend, when the three tried to cross the Kenyan border with several false passports. The trio will shortly be extradited to South Africa.
His arrest closes, for now, a case full of unforeseen twists. South African police had been desperately on the hunt for Bester for a month after new postmortem and DNA analysis revealed last month that the charred body found in the Facebook rapist's cell was that of another person who had died of a fracture. skull from a strong blow to the head. Those responsible for the new analyzes also stressed that the burned corpse gave off a strong paraffin odor and his face and hands had been thoroughly burned.
The case has caused consternation in South Africa over evidence that Bester, 35, was helped to escape from one of the most secure prisons in the country. Three South African employees of the British security company G4S, in charge of surveillance in the prison where the events occurred, have been accused of helping the prisoner escape. The Pretoria executive has already announced that he will not renew the contract with the company, which expires in 2026.
Bester's audacity after escaping from prison has also filled the pages of the main local newspapers. During the months after his simulated death and his escape, the Facebook rapist led a quiet and luxurious life in Johannesburg, where he resided in a mansion in Sandton, one of the most exclusive neighborhoods in the city. Bester and his partner even operated a shell property sales company from which they defrauded various people of millions of dollars.
His perfect escape would have been a reality had it not been for the independent South African outlet GroundUp, which spent a year investigating the loose ends of the case and even published photos of the fugitive shopping in a supermarket, which led the police to take action on the matter. For months, GroundUp journalists collected evidence that the prison's security cameras were moved the night of the fire, that a group of people left the compound a few minutes before the flames, and interviewed other inmates who claimed to have seen strange things. that night. They confirmed something else: Bester enjoyed inexplicable privileges while in prison, such as access to a computer with an Internet connection from which he came to hold a conference.
The corruption that transpires from Bester's ultimately frustrated escape has caused a social storm in one of the countries with the most sexual assaults in the world. In February, the South African police published the record of the last twelve months and the numbers were to shake us: in South Africa 138 rapes are reported every day.
