Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2003. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2003. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Reuters NewMedia - December 21, 2003
Paul Busharizi
Inspector Lunga Ntsinde said police were hunting for at least one other suspect in last week's murder of 21-year-old Lorna Mlosana, who was raped in a toilet of a Cape Town area bar on December 14.
"We are still looking for a man who is believed to be the main suspect. But he appears to have disappeared," Ntsinde said.
Mlosana, a training volunteer with the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), South Africa's largest HIV/AIDS activist group, was attacked in the bathroom of a tavern in the township of Khayelitsha and repeatedly raped, Ntsinde told Reuters.
"After they finished, the lady told them she was HIV positive, and then they took her outside and killed her," Ntsinde said.
Mlosana was apparently kicked to death, he said.
TAC head Zackie Achmat, who along with the organization was recently nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for work on promoting HIV/AIDS awareness in South Africa, said the group would hold a protest on Monday to express its outrage over the attack.
"It's a criminal element and we are going to make sure they get prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law," Achmat told the South African Press Association.
South Africa has the world's highest number of HIV/AIDS cases with some five million of its 45 million people infected with the disease. HIV activists -- who recently persuaded the government to begin rolling out AIDS anti-retroviral drug treatment in the public sector -- say that the stigma associated with the virus is dangerously hobbling efforts to fight the disease.
One of the first South Africans to go public with her HIV-positive status, Durban activist Gugu Dlamini, was killed by a mob that included her own neighbors in 1998 after she revealed that she was carrying the AIDS virus.
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