{"id":25057,"date":"2023-04-08T15:55:59","date_gmt":"2023-04-08T19:55:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/?p=25057"},"modified":"2023-04-08T15:55:59","modified_gmt":"2023-04-08T19:55:59","slug":"thabo-bester-facebook-rapist-who-faked-death-arrested-in-tanzania","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/2023\/04\/08\/thabo-bester-facebook-rapist-who-faked-death-arrested-in-tanzania\/","title":{"rendered":"Thabo Bester: ‘Facebook rapist’ who faked death arrested in Tanzania"},"content":{"rendered":"
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A rapist and murderer who escaped a South African prison by faking his own death has been arrested in Tanzania.<\/b><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Thabo Bester was at large for a year after it was thought he died by setting himself on fire in his prison cell.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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A manhunt was launched last month after a new post-mortem investigation revealed the body wasn’t actually his.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Bester was caught on Friday with his girlfriend and a third suspect and will be extradited to South Africa.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Police said they believe the trio were intending to flee into neighbouring Kenya.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Bester is known as the “Facebook rapist” for using the social networking site to lure his victims.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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He was convicted in 2012 for the rape and murder of his model girlfriend Nomfundo Tyhulu. A year earlier, he’d been found guilty of raping and robbing two other women.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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In May, it was reported he had been found dead in his cell after apparently setting himself on fire at the Mangaung Correctional Centre in the city of Bloemfontein.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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However, local media began to raise doubts about Bester’s death late last year.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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In March, police opened a new murder investigation after further tests revealed the deceased was not Bester – and that the unidentified person had died from blunt-force trauma to the head.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Employees of the British-owned security company G4S, which ran the prison where he was held, have been accused of helping him flee.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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It has said three employees were dismissed in connection with the incident.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Earlier this week, representatives for the organisation failed to attend a meeting in parliament about Bester’s escape. The BBC has approached G4S for comment.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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There’ve been many reported sightings of Bester over the past year, including claims he was grocery shopping in an affluent suburb of Johannesburg, and was living in a rented mansion there.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Bester’s escape sparked outrage in South Africa, which has one of the highest rates of sexual assault in the world.<\/p>\n

Source: bbc.co.uk<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A rapist and murderer who escaped a South African prison by faking his own death has been arrested in Tanzania. Thabo Bester was at large for a year after it was thought he died by […]<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":25058,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[109,2,6],"tags":[3033,4122,9335,6461,20,977,6044],"class_list":{"0":"post-25057","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headline","8":"category-news","9":"category-world","10":"tag-bloemfontein","11":"tag-g4s","12":"tag-mangaung-correctional-centre","13":"tag-prison-escapes","14":"tag-rape","15":"tag-south-africa","16":"tag-tanzania","17":"pmpro-has-access"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25057","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25057"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25057\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25060,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25057\/revisions\/25060"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25058"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25057"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25057"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25057"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}