Preacher, wife on run, trigger ire, confusion in South Africa
CAPE TOWN, South Africa – A preacher who calls himself a prophet has triggered anger, a diplomatic incident and a good amount of head scratching by authorities in South Africa after skipping bail, fleeing the country and emerging in his home nation of Malawi while facing charges of money laundering and fraud relating to more than $6 million.
Shepherd Bushiri and his wife, Mary, who have both been charged, failed to report to a police station in South Africa on Friday to meet their bail conditions. Bushiri then released a statement and appeared on a television station on Saturday, saying they were now in their country of birth over 1,000 miles away despite apparently having no travel documents.
He presented a list of demands for him and his wife to return to South Africa, including that the police team and prosecutors investigating them be changed. He accused them of bias. He also said there had been attempts to kill the couple since 2015 without giving further details and demanded police protection.
South Africa responded by issuing an arrest warrant for the “two fugitives” and canceled their bail and confiscated the $26,000 they put up as bond. They have until Thursday to hand themselves in at a courthouse in the capital, Pretoria, said Col. Katlego Mogale, the spokeswoman for the Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation, a police unit that investigates high-profile crimes. Failing that, authorities will start confiscating the Bushiris’ properties, which include a $350,000 house in an exclusive estate on the outskirts of Pretoria.
And if the Bushiris don’t return, “then we would go to the Malawian government to enforce the arrest warrant,” Mogale said.
South African authorities still haven’t worked out how the Bushiris slipped out of the country after police said they took away their passports when they were released on bail.
But the intrigue increased with allegations by a South African lawmaker that the couple escaped on a plane carrying Malawian President Lazarus Chakwera home after an official visit to South Africa last week.
The claim has been denied by both governments but was repeated by South African ruling party lawmaker Bongani Bongo, who chairs a parliamentary committee on Home Affairs and who asked the minister of Home Affairs to explain the Bushiris’ escape.
Malawi denied that the Bushiris were on the president’s plane and complained that President Chakwera’s departure Friday from a military airbase near Pretoria was delayed for seven hours by South Africa for “unspecified security reasons.”
The Malawians said South African security personnel searched Chakwera’s plane.
South Africa Home Affairs Minister Aaron Motsoaledi raised the possibility that the Bushiris left through a land border into northern neighbor Zimbabwe and then onto Malawi.