A student was kidnapped on Thursday at the Kingsway Campus of the University of Johannesburg. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
By Mfuneko Toyana and Emelia Motsai
The University of Johannesburg (UJ) student, who was kidnapped on a campus at gun point and then driven around in the boot of her car on Thursday, said she could have been killed because UJ security “did nothing”.
In a live interview with Radio702’s Xolani Gwala, the woman who asked not to be named, said:
“My life was in the hands of UJ security and they did nothing.”
She was describing to Gwala how the man who had kidnapped her managed to drive past boom gates and off the campus in Auckland Park, even though security saw that the card in his possession did not belong to him.
She recalled that the man had driven around for a while with her in the boot until he stopped and she realised he was talking to a UJ security guard at one of the boomed, access-controlled exits.
“He opened the window so slightly, just enough to put out his hand and swipe the card,” she said.
“He rolled forward and rolled forward to ensure his face wasn’t captured by the cameras.”
[pullquote align=”right”]”The whole time he was keeping the card in front of his face so the cameras couldn’t capture him.”[/pullquote]She was piecing together what she had perceived from inside the boot and from CCTV footage captured by UJ surveillance.
But the card had not been functional and so the security guard approached and asked to the student card.
She says she heard the man speaking to the security guard in a language that was not English, and assumed that the guard had realised the card did not belong to the driver of the car.
The whole time he was keeping the card in front of his face so the cameras couldn’t capture him,” she said.
From the footage caught on camera the 23-year woman said that one could see the security guard taking the card from the man and returning with it to his cubicle.
She said he then put his elbow over the window in such a way that again his face would be hidden from any cameras.
[pullquote]Her student card had been left in the control room and nothing done to verify her whereabouts.[/pullquote]“He was clever… He knew exactly what he was doing.”
She then describes how the man waited for one of the other booms to open and then drove into on-coming traffic in order to exit the campus.
The woman was found later on Thursday in Eldorado Park, close to Lenasia.
This after the man had forced her to give him PIN numbers for her bank cards, withdrawn the money and then dropped her off near an open veld.
The woman told Gwala that she found out that her student card had been left in the control room and nothing done to verify her whereabouts.
She said “nothing was done” even though the student card contained all her information – car registration, contact numbers of her parents.
An 18-year-old man was arrested today after the woman’s car was traced to a residence in Ennerdale, about 15km’s from Eldorado Park.
In a statement released earlier today UJ said it was currently unable to link the arrest to the kidnapping that happened on Thursday or if the suspect in custody was a UJ student.
Read some of tweets in reaction to the incident here.
