News24.com | The hired car and the corpse: Witness tells court how Thabo Bester escaped

From back left, Senohe Matsoara, Teboho Lipholo, Motenyani Masukela, Tieho Makhotsa, and Natassja Jansen, stand in the dock on Friday at the Bloemefontein Magistrate's Court.

• The Bloemfontein Magistrate's Court was given a version of the escape of Thabo Bester.
• The account was given by a witness testifying at the bail hearing of five people accused of aiding Bester.
• The witness gave a detailed account from the death of Katlego Bereng to the exit of Bester from prison.

For the first time, police have laid out what they believe happened during the escape of Thabo Bester from the Mangaung Correctional Centre on 3 May 2022.

The Bloemfontein Magistrate's Court heard the account from a witness statement from a member of the South African Police Service, who is part of the team working on the case. Media are not allowed to name the witness.

He spoke during the second of a two-day bail hearing for five people accused of aiding in the escape. All five worked at the facility but are no longer employed because of the serious allegations against them in this case.

The witness detailed the case against former G4S guards Senohe Matsoara, Motenyani Masukela, Tieho Makhotsa, and Natassja Jansen, as well as former Integritron Integrated Solutions (IIS) technician Teboho Lipholo.

His testimony states that Katlego Bereng, whose body was found in Bester's cell, is said to have collapsed at a taxi rank and rushed to National District Hospital Bloemfontein.

According to the witness, doctors tried to resuscitate Bereng, to no avail.

READ | Thabo Bester has no ID but is South African based on criminal record, fingerprints - cops

Bester's lover, Dr Nandipha Magudumana, allegedly claimed his body from a mortuary, purporting it to be a friend's brother.

"She claimed she was assisting (name withheld) to have the corpse buried… the funeral service was held at a house [in Mangaung] Phase 2."

The witness said Matsoara, then a supervisor at the prison, took the body from the home.

"The corpse was not buried. Upon exhuming the grave, instead of a corpse, we found three 10kg bags of mielie meal in the coffin."

The witness said that on 27 April 2022, Magudumana's father, Zolile Sekeleni, hired a vehicle, which he used to transport Bereng's body to Bloemfontein.

Matsoara is accused of taking the body into the prison on 29 April.

The witness detailed how Matsoara allegedly entered the sally port - an entry point with two gates and a holding area between it - without authorisation or a gate pass and without having the vehicle, which contained a TV stand and a bag with Bereng's body, searched.

Masukela was the officer at the entry point who allowed Matsoara in. But the plan hit a snag when an operating supervisor heard about a vehicle trying to enter without an access pass as the car was midway between the gates.

"When [Masukela] was told not to allow the vehicle in, [the operating supervisor] received a call about an emergency which he needed to attend to immediately, then the vehicle was allowed in."

The witness said there was no emergency.

Matsoara drove to a workshop in the prison yard, where Masukela assisted him in dropping off the TV stand and the bag with the body inside.

The car then left.

Lipholo placed the bag with the body into a trolley dustbin and wheeled it into the prison, where it was deposited into a passage leading to the prison roof known as the "dark room".

On 2 May, Lipholo pretended to knock off in the evening by clocking out on a fingerprint reader, but he remained in the building to allegedly disconnect the cameras.

READ | Search for Bester, Magudumana: Cops kept low profile by entering Tanzania as tourists - source

Motsoara was not supposed to work that night but changed shifts with a colleague.

The supervisor then went into a prison block called Walls, where he went into a cell with four prisoners and spoke to them.

Later, smoke was detected in cell 35, where Bester was held. Motsoara went to check but said there was no smoke.

The guard posted at the Broadway block, where Bester was held, was told by Motsoara to attend to a prisoner with a stomach ache at the Walls block.

The "sick" prisoner was one of the four inmates Motsoara had visited earlier.

"This official tried to explain to Motsoara that there was no way Broadway could be left without a guard – but he was subordinate to Motsoara. He had no choice but to obey."

Motsoara, then the only guard at the block, was allegedly unreachable on radio.

At 02:30 on 3 May 2022, Motsoara called Lepholo to the prison yard, where he was told to fetch the body in the Dark Room. The pair then placed Bereng's body in cell 35.

Bester was then given a G4S prison guard uniform as a disguise.

Makhotsa and Jansen were the ones who opened the doors for Bester, who exited the prison centre with Lepholo.

At 03:00 on 3 May 2023, an alarm was raised about the fire in cell 35 by inmates going to the kitchen to prepare breakfast.

"That's when the blaze was attended to… according to witnesses, Motsoara was only pretending to put out the fire and spent most of the time on his cellphone."

Only when officials from other blocks attended the scene was the fire extinguished. They believed the body in the cell was Bester, who had committed suicide by fire.

Magudumana will appear in court on 16 May for a bail hearing, as will Bester and Sekeleni, who is out on bail.

The court heard that more arrests are imminent.