Durban — A 52-year-old paedophile began serving jail time this week after being sentenced to life for the rape of three young children, aged 2, 3 and 7, in the Pinetown Magistrate’s Court.
Kwenzakuphi Msomi pleaded guilty before magistrate Siphiwe Hlophe.
The magistrate ordered that Msomi’s name be added to the National Register for Sexual Offenders.
Hlophe in sentencing said that Msomi was the kind of person who could not be trusted to co-exist with communities considering the manner in which the crime was perpetrated.
He said Msomi targeted, groomed and conditioned his victims in a bid to avoid getting caught, adding that he needed to be kept in custody for his whole life term.
Msomi was molesting and raping children in the area he lived. Authorities came to know of three children following cellphone footage captured on the phone of one of his victims.
The State led evidence that after having raped the three children, Msomi would tell them to perform sexual acts on each other while the other child took videos on a cellphone.
Further to this, they had been groomed into believing that there was nothing wrong with what Msomi was doing to them. The State said the children had been conditioned in such a way by the accused that they would willingly go to Msomi’s house.
Two of the three children are siblings. Msomi’s actions were exposed after the mother of one of the children saw the videos and nude pictures on the child’s phone.
The mother confronted the children, who detailed what Msomi had been doing to them as well as what they had been doing to each other on his instructions.
The rapes and molestation of these three children continued from 2021 until 2022, until the mother called the police after seeing the videos.
In aggravation of sentence, prosecutor Simphiwe Magagula said the accused had imposed trauma on such young children, going to the extent of having them film each other while performing sexual acts.
She said that in these pictures and videos, the children had their private parts exposed, and “there was no telling who else had seen these images and videos”.
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