[imagesource: TimesLIVE / Court documents]

More harrowing details have emerged about businesswoman Sandra Munsamy’s intense 162-day hostage situation following her 2019 kidnapping.

She has been testifying in the Durban high court against the four men charged with her kidnapping, the beginning of which we covered at the start of this week.

We learnt that she had been thrown from boot, to cupboard, to a mattress on the floor, and eventually chained to a wall, where she waited for months as her captors tried to negotiate a $10 million (R154 million) ransom settlement in exchange for her safe release.

That image above is the wall that she was chained to, where she was only able to move from the bed to the toilet for a large portion of her nightmarish ordeal.

It has been confirmed that her alleged captors – Lucas John Ndlovu, 36, Dumisani Radebe, 39, Mozambicans Jose Omega Tembe, 38, and Arthur Da Silva Mondlane, 39 – all face charges of kidnapping, robbery with aggravating circumstances, and attempted extortion, reported TimesLIVE.

Tembe and Mondlane have been found to be the “kingpins” behind two of SA’s biggest kidnapping gangs, which allowed them to live lavish lifestyles.

Per the continuation of her testimony, the kidnappers were allegedly willing to wait for up to a year for her family to come up with the money.

They also seemed to know quite a lot about the family’s business and financial situation:

“The boss went on saying that he knew my family very well and he knew me well, and that I handle all the finances of the business. He went on by saying that my family was very wealthy, we had an account in Dubai and we had an account in Mauritius. He said they were looking for an amount of $10m and if my family don’t pay this money they will keep me for as long as one year.”

Frighteningly, there were also apparently threats to move her out of the country.

To add to her anxiety, when she was forced to make a call with her brother, Inderan Naicker, to make the demand real, she learned that her parents had fallen ill:

“Inderan said we didn’t have that sort of money. He was taken aback because he knew we didn’t have this money. He was speechless. I told Inderan if we don’t give them this money they are going to keep home here for a year. It was on the same call that Inderan mentioned my mom and dad were very sick.”

The two men who looked after Munsamy, whom she had called Michael and Gabriel, always had their balaclavas on so she was never able to see their faces.

However, on the night that she was rescued, she did manage to catch a glimpse of Michael’s (Radebe) face and said she noticed a scar.

When asked if she would recognise Michael if she saw him, Munsamy broke down in tears and said that was a road she never wanted to go down.

On November 7, 2019, Munsamy was rescued from the nightmare house in Witbank, thanks to a joint operation by several law enforcement agencies, reported IOL.

The trial is still ongoing, with another 32 witnesses still to be called.

[sources:timeslive&iol]