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Tzaneen, Limpopo – A Limpopo man has been jailed for life by the High Court sitting in Tzaneen for killing and raping an elderly woman, police said on Friday.
Solomon Mzamani Mathebula, 36, was sentenced on Thursday for killing 74-year-old Maria Tsatsawani Matsheke in Malamulele on February 5 last year, Colonel Ronel Otto said.
Matsheke’s body was found at her home with her breast and lips cut. She was raped before being killed. The house had been broken into. – Sapa
Two people have been arrested for murder and two for rape in North West, police said on Sunday.
Capt Adele Myburgh said a 24-year-old man was arrested in Jouberton for stabbing a man to death in an argument on Saturday.
“The suspect took a knife and [fatally] stabbed the victim in his neck.”
Police arrested the man at the scene.
Myburgh said a teenage boy from Madikwe was arrested on Saturday, by police acting on a tip- off, for stabbing to death a 20-year-old man.
In Mmabatho, a man was arrested for a rape on Friday.
“A group of friends were spending some time together and the victim felt tired and decided to go and sleep. The suspect allegedly came into her room and raped her,” said Myburgh.
Another man was arrested on Friday for breaking into a house, raping a mentally ill 19-year-old woman and stealing food, she said.
Police said the woman’s family was at a night vigil, but regularly phoned her. They became worried when she did not answer her cellphone and returned to find that she had been raped and the house had been burgled. -Sapa
One of the suspects arrested in an investigation of a Central Florida white supremacist organization was re-arrested and released on Friday because of a bond issue.
According to Osceola County deputies, at approximately 4:45 p.m., Patricia Faella turned herself into the Osceola County Jail. Earlier Friday afternoon, an arrest warrant was issued for her re-arrest after her original bail was supposed to be $500,000 for one count, $1,000 for another and $250 for a third count.
According to Karen Levey, director of due process services for the Orange County circuit court, when warrants were signed for all of the suspects, Circuit Judge Walter Komanski set bonds from $50,000 to $500,000. Within 24 hours if an inmate doesn’t bond out, they have a first appearance with a judge and that judge can change the bond.
Instead, Faella was released on a $5,000 bond. She is accused of being one of the local directors of the American Front organization, along with her husband, Marcus, who was also arrested and released on $50,000 bond, which was the original amount.
In the new arrest warrant, the court says it made a mistake in releasing Faella on a lower bond amount, citing “confusion amongst the court and the assistant state attorney concerning the actual charges involved and what degree felonies.”
Judge Theotis Bronson wasn’t informed that Faella was part of this group and didn’t know the circumstances surrounding her arrest, Levey said.
The new arrest warrant also says the court didn’t set the arrest warrants for any of the other co-defendants and had “no intention of lowering this defendant’s bond amount.”
Other judges handled the other initial appearances and chose to keep the bonds the same, Levey said. According to Levey, when Judge Bronson realized it, he revoked the bond and signed a warrant for her arrest on Thursday.
Also arrested were Mark McGowan; McGowan’s wife, Jennifer McGowan, 25; Diane Stevens, 28; Kent McLellan, 22 and Paul Jackson, 25, for their involvement in the AF, according to court documents. Most are still in jail on bonds $500,000 and above, while the Faellas have since been released.
A total of 11 have been charged of hate crimes, criminal conspiracy and teaching paramilitary training (showing another person to make or use a firearm), according to affidavits.
The building was a corner market once, tucked among the houses on the city’s west side, but the shelves of fruits and vegetables and the meat counter are long gone.
What was once the storefront is sealed up, wrapped with battered white siding. There is a hand-painted sign on the back that says “Masjid Wali Mahmoud.” Inside, 17 men were seated on pale green-blue carpeting, gathered for prayer under fluorescent lights.
It was the Friday of the big lottery jackpot. In the world beyond the walls, the day was percolating with half-billion-dollar dreams. Anthony Weatherspoon had intended to talk about something else, but, as he told his small congregation “we always ask Allah for inspiration.”
“There is a frenzy out there to go out and buy a lottery ticket,” he said. “Is it tempting? Yes. They make it tempting. It’s the glitter. It’s that hope. It’s that wish that you win, one in a hundred and some million chances of winning. What does it tell us in the Quran? We are not immune to the temptation.”
Weatherspoon is a retired forest products specialist with the state of Michigan, a big-framed man who grew up on a farm in Cass County, the imam here for the past dozen years. The wonders of the natural world and the science of plants have a way of popping up in his preaching, woven in among moral teachings that make much of reliance on God and working to build the community.
“It tells us in the Quran, gambling only benefits a few, but it is a harm to many,” Weatherspoon continued. “Right now, we’re saying this half a billion dollars is going to benefit either one or very few and many who should not be spending those dollars are buying lottery tickets. That money is gone … Give it to someone who needs that dollar. You’d be better blessed and you’d be better off.”
Most of the men listening in respectful silence had come to Lansing as refugees, escaping a brutal civil war in Somalia.
Others were men like Weatherspoon, who once had an X in his name.
This place used to be Nation of Islam Temple No. 16. From the winter of 1969 to the middle of the 1970s, the men and women who came here heard a message of black glorification and white demonization, of self-sufficiency, self-discipline and self-love, framed by a reading of Islam that would have been only thinly recognizable to the rest of the Muslim world.
By Friday, jurors are expected to begin weighing the evidence against a Texas murder suspect allegedly linked to Kingdom Identity Ministries, a racist, anti-Semitic group that opposes mixing of the races. Defendant Mark Simmons of Buda told an investigating officer that the victim, his friend Steven Woelfel, deserved to die because he had a Mexican girlfriend, according to testimony in the Hays County trial.
Simmons contended that after years of the U.S. government spying on him, he was in a paranoid mental state at the time of the killing, according to the San Marcos Mercury. He testified that he accidentally shot the 55-year-old Woelfel in his friend’s home in April 2010 and let the body sit for a week before setting a fire that burned it beyond recognition. In addition to murder, he’s charged with arson and tampering with evidence.
A Texas ranger testified at the trial that when Simmons, 52, was arrested he had white supremacist literature in his possession, including the book Vigilantes of Christendom: The History of the Phineas Priesthood. The book, said ranger Jimmy Schroeder, concerns a Biblical figure named Phineas, who apparently kills a mixed-race couple to win God’s favor.
Schroeder also said he found the words “avenger of blood,” apparently in Simmons’ handwriting, on charred paper in the garage — ostensibly a reference to the Phineas book. Schroeder said investigators also found information about cleaning a crime scene and disposing of a body in the garage.
Before his capture in June 2010, after weeks on the run, Simmons went to the home of Kingdom Identity Ministries founder Mike Hallimore, prosecutors said. Simmons claimed he visited Hallimore merely to annoy government agents who were spying on him from an aircraft.
Kingdom Identity Ministries, based in Harrison, Ark., is the largest supplier of materials related to Christian Identity, a radical-right theology that generally identifies people of color as soulless sub-humans and Jews as satanic or cursed by God. It churns out Identity Bible study courses, tracts and books, and teaches that Judgment Day will arrive in the form of a sanctified race war, a theory widely popular with prison-based racist gangs like the Aryan Brotherhood.
According to trial testimony, Simmons had once been interviewed by an
Arkansas investigator investigating Hallimore’s group after a pipe bomb was found at a church, and at that time Simmons allegedly said Woelfel deserved to die because he had a Mexican girlfriend.
Simmons denied having an affiliation with Kingdom Identity Ministries, telling the court that it doesn’t make sense, because he’s had intimate partners of difference races.
During the trial, Simmons railed about government aircraft spying on him and voiced his conviction that the U.S. government carried out the 9/11 terrorist attacks to create a rationale for war in the Middle East.
In his defense, Simmons said Woelfel had knelt over and pulled out a 9 mm pistol from a duffel bag, waving it at him as if to show off the gun. Simmons said he slapped the gun out of his friend’s hand, grabbed a nearby pistol and pointed it at his friend’s head. The bullet fired accidentally, he claimed, as he began to say, “How do you like it?” He said the gun, owned by Woelfel, had no safety.
But a medical examiner testified that the bullet passed from the top of Woelfel’s head into his spine, suggesting an execution-style killing.
Hays County District Attorney Sherry Tibbe told Hatewatch she was hopeful that the case would be sent to the jury by Friday. “We’re very comfortable with the evidence in this case and bringing it to trial.”
