OMPHITLHETSE MOOKI
A JOBURG Emergency Management Services paramedic is facing divorce after being repeatedly raped and forced to perform oral sex on strange men.
This was the testimony of a Roodepoort paramedic in the Johannesburg High Court yesterday, 19 months after she and a colleague were attacked after responding to an emergency call in Durban Deep, just outside Soweto.
The woman and her colleague were stripped naked, slapped around, made to perform oral sex, then raped by men who had found them treating an 18-month-old burn victim in an ambulance.
Her husband is now divorcing her, saying he cannot cope with the fact that other men had penetrated his wife.
“They have taken away my confidence. I’m now going through a divorce. He says he can’t cope with the fact that other men raped me… that he doesn’t know what (illnesses) they got,” said the woman, who cannot be named as she is a rape victim.
The March 5 incident left her traumatised, with events of that night etched in her mind.
She can’t get a good night’s rest or respond to emergencies in informal settlements without fear.
The child they were treating had been crying hysterically in the ambulance parked alongside a road leading into the informal settlement when the three men pounced.
One man told them: “If you try to scream or do anything stupid, I won’t hesitate, I’ll shoot you. Today you will be raped by vuilpops(trash). We greet you during the day and you didn’t respond. We propose love, you look down on us.”
The two women and the men who had accompanied the child’s mother to the ambulance were robbed of their belongings before being led into a field, where they were raped.
“They dragged us out with our pants. They then took us to the bushes… the gun was placed on my neck,” said the woman.
The women were beaten up and instructed to undress if they did not want to be taken to the informal settlement, where they would be locked in a shack and raped for five days.
“The one with a gun unzipped his pants, took his penis and told me to go down on my knees and suck it,” said the woman.
It was then that the men spotted an unknown man walking towards them in the field.
This man was beaten up for “disturbing” the group while “they worked”.
“They said ‘ siyasebenza la(we are working) and you come and disturb us’,” she said.
The armed man is alleged to have then inserted a finger into her vagina before instructing her to bend over and raping her.
“He then asked the guy with (colleague) if he was not getting in. The second man covered my head with a jersey and instructed me to open my legs. He also raped me until he ejaculated,” she said.
The passer-by was then forced to rape the women.
“They asked him: ‘You also want to climb? Today is your chance to sleep with nurses… paramedics’. They beat him, kicked him and threw him on top of me. They then beat him up with my boots on the bum, telling him ‘f*** this person’,” she continued.
The man, however, did not rape the woman. He whispered in her ear to pretend she was being raped.
“They were busy laughing. They then came back, beat up the man on the buttocks with boots, saying ‘You now don’t want to get off’,” she said.
The accused, Richard Tshifhiwa Luruli, 29, and Michael Khorombi, 30, pleaded not guilty to all 15 charges, including rape and a charge of compelled sexual assault.