MASERU — Lesotho’s police abducted and tortured a Mosotho man before illegally handing him over to South Africa to stand trial for unlawful escape and armed robbery.
Moloi Ralentsoe was handed over to the South African police through a border fence near Mafeteng, in an apparent violation of the extradition treaty between the two countries.
The South African police then allegedly tortured Ralentsoe and denied him access to medical care and legal representation.
As a result of the illegal actions of the two police forces the Bloemfontein High Court on Monday refused to prosecute Ralentsoe and ordered the South African police to return him to Lesotho.
The judge said because Ralentsoe had been illegally brought to South Africa, the court did not have jurisdiction to hear his case.
On Monday night the South African police escorted Ralentsoe to Lesotho.
The armed robbery for which Ralentsoe was supposed to face prosecution remains unsolved.
Ralentsoe is now in Ha-Matala but says he will never forget his harrowing ordeal at the hands of the local police who he said were “brutal and callous”.
The South African police, Ralentsoe says, were “equally vicious”.
We met Ralentsoe on Tuesday night as he was about to meet Haae Phoofolo, the lawyer who argued his case in the Bloemfontein High Court.
Bitter and angry, Ralentsoe says he is now planning to sue the local police for “torture, unlawful arrest and humiliation”.
In January 2007 Ralentsoe was arrested in Bloemfontein for allegedly hijacking a car at gunpoint and was duly charged at the magistrate’s court.
On February 15 last year he escaped from Grootvlei Prison where he had been awaiting trial since 2007.
He then made his way to Maseru.
Ralentsoe says he escaped because some documents crucial to his defence went missing from the court’s files.
He claims that when he raised the matter with a magistrate he was told that the case would still proceed without those documents.
“I concluded that this trial was not going to be fair and I decided to run away,” Ralentsoe says.
His freedom was however short-lived because a few days after escape he was on the run again, this time from local police.
And when they failed to catch him they arrested his wife, mother, brother, sister and cousin and demanded that they reveal his whereabouts.
His lawyer then advised him to surrender himself to the police.
“The police told me that I was wanted for a M3 million bank robbery that took place some time ago at the Cathedral Area in Maseru and I was taken to Mabote police station,” Ralentsoe says.
“I was expecting to be charged with bank robbery when all of a sudden the police told me that they could not charge me because there was no sufficient evidence against me. They instead transferred me to Mafeteng saying I was a suspect in a robbery case there.”
The Mafeteng police did not charge him. Instead he claims that the police said he was wanted in South Africa for escaping from unlawful custody.
They then took him to the Mafeteng court where a magistrate, who was smoking outside the court, told him that the police had successfully applied for the extension of his detention.
“There was no prosecutor because it was before the usual opening of the courts and I had doubts that this man was a magistrate.”
He claims that he was surprised when, instead of taking him back to the Mafeteng police station “the police van took a different direction”.
“I was seated chained in the back of the van and when I saw it taking a different direction and getting out of the Mafeteng town I screamed saying the police were abducting me,” he recalls.
“They drove away from the main road to the countryside where they stuffed a big cloth into my mouth and began kicking and beating me.
“Then they wrapped a blanket around my waist and chained me in the back of the van before driving away. They also blindfolded me.”
Ralentsoe says the police removed the cloth from his face when they were at Ha-Tšupane police post, which is near a fence that separates Lesotho and South Africa.
“There was a South African police van and some uniformed SAPS officers on the other side.”
There is no designated border at Ha-Tšupane.
He was then handed over to the South African police through the fence, bundled in a van and driven towards Wepener, a border town across Mafeteng.
Ralentsoe said he was taken to the countryside where the police interrogated him about his escape from Grootvlei prison, beat and ordered him to reveal the name of a police officer who assisted him to escape.
“When I answered that nobody helped me they kicked and hit me until I was bleeding from my manhood. I was also bleeding from the ears. I don’t know for how long they were going to beat me had a white policeman not stopped them, saying they would kill me.”
At Wepener police station he was instructed to fill a form confirming that he was an illegal immigrant. He refused.
Later that week he was taken to Bloemfontein where the police further allegedly beat him before charging him with escaping from custody.
“In Bloemfontein I explained to the magistrate that the police had beaten me. I requested an order that I be taken to a doctor but the magistrate said her role was not to issue orders in relation to my medical needs.”
Ralentsoe says the magistrate then ordered that he remains in detention at Grootvlei Prison until trial.
He says a constable at the prison told him that there was an instruction not to allow him visitation and access to telephones. The constable, he says, lent him a mobile phone which he used to call his wife and instructed Phoofolo to represent him.
Phoofolo then gathered evidence that Ralentsoe was abducted into South Africa, which he used in the Bloemfontein High Court to argue that the South African courts had no jurisdiction to try him.
On Monday, the Bloemfontein High Court heard conflicting evidence from Lesotho and South African police as to how Ralentsoe had ended up in South Africa.
South Africa’s Captain Mochesela told the court that he saw Ralentsoe crossing a border fence into the Republic at 11am on June 8, 2010 and walked for about a kilometre before he arrested him.
Lesotho police’s evidence showed that at that time Ralentsoe was in their custody and they claimed that he escaped from them at around 1300 hours.
There was no evidence that the Lesotho police opened a case of escape from custody against Ralentsoe.
South Africa’s Organised Crime Unit’s Hendric Khau said: “We saw this man coming from the Lesotho side of the border. We waited until we saw that he could cross the fence and then we decided to arrest him.”
Khau’s version was that there was a fence where Relentsoe crossed while Mochesela’s suggested that the border was porous.
The High Court freed Ralentsoe on Monday this week, after 17 months and two weeks in Grootvlei Prison.
Lesotho’s police spokesperson, Masupha Masupha, yesterday insisted that Ralentsoe escaped from the Mafeteng police. Masupha also said Ralentsoe is yet to face at least two charges of armed robbery in Maseru and Mafeteng.
“In one of those armed robberies, where he is suspected of robbing the Standard Lesotho Bank at Cathedral Area in Maseru, he shot and injured a policeman,” Masupha said.
