HIV POSITIVE TEACHER COULD FACE LIFE IN JAIL FOR RAPING BOY AT SCHOOL:

A SOWETO primary school teacher may spend the rest of his life in prison after he was found guilty of raping one of the pupils at his school.

“I have no doubt that the accused penetrated [the boy] on the afternoon in question‚” Magistrate Audrey Mpofu said in the Protea Magistrate’s Court in Soweto yesterday.

The boy‚ who was then 10 years old‚ accused the teacher‚ who is in his 40s‚ of sexually violating him on the school premises in November 2013.

The teacher was acquitted on a charge of raping another boy‚ then aged nine‚ who accused the man of assaulting him at Maponya Mall in Soweto after offering him a lift home from soccer practice.

The teacher was also acquitted on a charge of attempted murder‚ for knowingly exposing the older boy to HIV.

The teacher‚ who cannot be identified in order to protect the identities of the children, previously told the court that he was HIV-positive and he had known this for the past eight years.

Mpofu rejected the teacher’s explanation that he had had an affair with the older boy’s mother‚ saying that the defence tried to use this as a motive for why the boy would lay false charges of rape. “The explanation [of the alleged affair] was not as structured as one would expect it to be‚” she said.

Mpofu said the acquittal on the second rape charge was mainly because the younger boy‚ who was allegedly the first to be raped‚ only came forward after a year and there were inconsistencies in his story.

After the judgment‚ the mother of the older rape victim said she was happy because she had been waiting for a long time for justice to be served.

“He [the teacher] must stay in prison. Why did he do that to my child and then lie about me? I wish he gets a life sentence‚” she said.

Life imprisonment is the prescribed minimum sentence for raping a child.

The case was postponed to July for sentencing.