My wife Gayle and I were living in Johannesburg when our daughter Belinda Abbott attended St Teresa’s School there. It was more commonly known as Rosebank Convent and she was in her late teens, fresh out of the convent in 1998, when we organised for her to go to the Natal Technikon in Durban because it had such a good reputation for teaching Clothing Design.
This was something Belinda had always wanted to do from when she was a little girl. And in her last school year she even designed and made her own dress for the matric dance.
We bought a two bedroomed flat for her not far from the Tech in Durban with the idea that she would get a companion to share it with her. But when she initially got there she hadn’t had time to find somebody when it happened.
Belinda was woken in the middle of the night by an Indian in his underpants standing next to her bed. He told her he had come to help her. She immediately started spraying him with the mace spray I had given her for just such an occasion. It was a particularly large one which enabled her to keep spraying him as he ran through the flat and out of the window he had come in through.
When I went down to Durban to comfort her it was clear that the intruder had spent some time in the first floor flat before he had come into Belinda’s bedroom. Like a wild animal marking its territory he had left his calling card under quite few of the cushions in the lounge.
At the time Belinda had no way of knowing that she had escaped unscathed from a physical point of view from what turned out to be possibly South Africa’s most prolific serial rapist. But the mental scars of such a horrendous experience will be with her for the rest of her life.
“I didn’t sleep for two years after that,” she told me. But this did not stop her excelling at her studies during her three year course at the Tech. Shortly after this terrifying experience one of the local papers carried a picture of a boyish looking Andrew Mohammed, who had escaped from the CR Swart police cells there while waiting to appear at an identity parade. And when I showed Belinda his picture in the paper she identified him as the man who had been in her flat.
In spite of her terrifying experience she still completed her National Diploma in Clothing Design cum laude top of the class of about 40 students at the Tech. She was also a finalist in the Du Pont Fashion Awards in which there were 79 entries from two competing Technikons. And now 30 years later she runs her own successful fashion house Once Was that she founded in Melbourne, Australia. It is hardly surprising that the last place that she wanted to built her career was in South Africa where she was born.
The 30 year old Mahomed said at one stage he “just walked out” of the Police station in Durban. The cops were clearly not paying attention to one of their most notorious sex offenders. He was facing a variety of sex crimes and armed robbery. Within a few days he continued to terrorise young white women in Pretoria half the country away. He also stole cars from some of them, which he sold through a contact.
It took the Pretoria police to do what the ones in Durban had failed so dismally to do. In the Commercial Crimes Court there he was sentenced to an effective 177 years in jail. This meant his sentence was only for part of what he had done because, as he got such a huge jail term there it was considered pointless to try him again for his similar crime spree in the Durban area. He held up some of his victims with a gun before raping or sexually assaulting them. The only plus about Belinda’s experience was that when he got into her flat he had evidently not yet been able to obtain a gun.
He was sentenced after he pleaded guilty to 23 charges of rape, attempted rape, indecent assault, armed robbery and the illegal possession of a fire arm. All but two of his victims were aged between 18 and 30.
He even forced some of his victims to have oral sex with him.
The Police forensic psychologist Captain Lynne Evans told the court that because of the number of cases and the physical violence involved there was a possibility he would have ended up murdering somebody if he had not been caught.
Pleading for a second chance Mahomed told the court, “I have a wife and child to support and if my wife knew I was a serial rapist she would have divorced me long ago.” If his wife hadn’t known she must have been in another world.
A former Northern Transvaal gymnast was just 19 when she broke both her ankles as she jumped out of a two story window after being raped by Mohamed. She subsequent successfully claimed damages from the State for the negligence of the Police in letting Mohamed escape after he was first arrested in Durban.
Australia’s premier horse and made while she were playing Belinda
race the Melbourne Cup was still at school was fine tuning her
were able to have their picture skills for her career
taken with the actual Cup in Dress Designing
