Advances made in finding stolen babies
ADVANCEMENTS in technology have helped police do their jobs more efficiently and find stolen babies more easily than in 1997, when three-day-old Zephany Nurse was snatched from Groote Schuur Hospital.
Lieutenant-Colonel Mike Barkhuizen, the investigating officer who arrested the woman convicted of kidnapping Nurse, testified in the Western Cape High Court yesterday that over the last 19 years, six other children had been kidnapped from hospitals in the province, and all had been reunited with their mothers.
Barkhuizen presented evidence that in 2008, 5-month-old Liyabonga Guvana of Grabouw was abducted from Hottentots Holland Hospital when a stranger asked her mother if she could hold her.
The woman disappeared with Guvana, and a 23-year-old woman, who had miscarried shortly before the incident, was arrested for the kidnapping.
In 2009, 2-week-old Siphesihle Ncumani was kidnapped from a ward in Tygerberg Hospital while his mother was in a coma in another ward. A month later a woman was arrested and later sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment.
In February 2010, a stranger offered Annie Lavelot, who had given birth only hours earlier, a lift home from Worcester Hospital. The woman snatched Lavelot’s baby and disappeared. Three days later the police found the woman and reunited Lavelot with her baby.
In April that same year, Zukiswa Sikuni visited the Mitchells Plain Hospital with her day-old baby boy when a woman asked her to go and buy juice while she watched her baby. When Sikuni returned, the woman and her child were missing. Police eventually made an arrest and the kidnapper was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment.
Last year Baxolile SemSem, a 12-day-old baby boy, was kidnapped from his cot next to his mother’s bed at Groote Schuur Hospital. Cleaner Ntobekhaya Mgqaza was arrested the next day and sentenced to five years’ imprisonment.
“At the time Zephany was kidnapped, we didn’t have the specialised units we do now, and since then the protection of women and children has been prioritised,” Barkhuizen said. He was the final State witness called to argue in aggravation of sentence.
francesca.villette@inl.co.za