ONGWEDIVA – Attending a Christmas eve mass has turned into horror for an 18-year old woman in the Oshana Region.
The victim who was on her way from church at Okatana, some kilometres outside the town of Oshakati was allegedly raped by a taxi driver who offered her a ride. The incident took place on the 24th of last month at around 23h00. The taxi driver, 24-year-old David Teofilus, made his first court appearance in the Oshakati Magistrate’s Court and has been remanded in jail. The woman who lives at Oshoopala location in Oshakati, which is a few kilometres from Okatana, allegedly found herself in shock and horror when she realised that the taxi was travelling in a different direction and not in the direction she asked him to drive.
Her protests to the driver to halt the taxi so that she could get off fell on deaf ears as the driver allegedly sped off with her to his place at Onawa, a village, which is also close to Oshakati. There the driver allegedly forcefully grabbed and shoved her out of the vehicle and took her to his room where he proceeded to rape her. The taxi driver is not known to his victim. It was only the following day when the taxi driver released her and she eventually managed to go to the police station at Oshakati to report the incident. She directed the police to the place where the incident happened and where her rapist was still resting when the police happened upon him and he was consequently arrested.
In a separate incident, a one-year old infant drowned at Ohailulu, a village in the Endola constituency of the Oshana Region. According to the Oshana police the child was left home with her grandmother at a homestead. However, the granny allegedly came to realise that the homestead was too quite and when she looked around she could not find the toddler anywhere. She then followed the child’s footprints, which were traced up to a pond outside the homestead where the toddler was discovered drowned. The incident happened on January 1, 2014. Also, a 63-year-old pensioner was discovered hanging from a Mopane tree in his mahangu field in an incident that happened at Oshikulu Ompanda, a village in the Oshana Region. Tobias Namlandu hanged himself with a rope and no suicide note was found at the scene.
By Kakunawe Shinana