Armed robbers plague DUT
CCOUNTING student Keiyuren Govender was walking with a female friend outside DUT’s Ritson campus on Monday last week when they were approached be a man asking for money for cigarettes.
When the 19- year- old second-year student told him he did not have any money, he said the man kept following them.
“We crossed the road to avoid him but he followed us. He grabbed my friend and pointed a knife at her leg. He told me he would stab her should I not give him my cellphone.”
The distraught teenager tried to stall the man as he and his friend made their way towards campus security guards.
But just then another man pounced “from nowhere” and stood in front of him, demanding his cellphone, which he handed over.
“Campus security then saw what was happening and they acted instantly,” said Govender.
The guards gave chase but the men jumped into a slow-moving taxi.
Govender said when he went to DUT’s protection services department to report the matter, he was told this was the fourth such mugging.
“If this is the fourth incident, why hasn’t DUT appointed security outside Gate 3, if this is the criminals’ haven?” he asked.
His worried father, Raj Govender, said his son needed a cellphone to contact his parents when he needed to be picked up from campus.
“He has no phone now and we are afraid of buying another for him. When this happened, his phone was not even in his hand, but how did they know that he owns one? DUT should really have security outside campus as well, for the safety of our children,” he said.
Last month first-year student Mehnaaz Khan, 18, was also held at knifepoint at the same spot by men who demanded her cellphone.
The medical orthotics and prosthetics student was approached by three men just outside campus Gate 3.
They surrounded her, one pretending to have a conversation on his cellphone while two stood beside her with a knife.
The man on the cellphone instructed her not to scream but to quietly hand her cellphone to the man with the knife.
“I was scared for my life; it was like I was having an anxiety attack,” said Khan.
“I wanted to scream but the guy in front of me kept threatening me not to scream.”
After she handed over her cellphone her mother drove by and the robbers jumped into a passing taxi.
Her mother, Nasarene Khan, went straight to campus security, who allegedly told her that her daughter should have screamed to get their attention.
But the guards had said they only assisted students inside campus, not outside, Nasarene said.
After hearing of other campus muggings, she took DUT’s management to task for allegedly not doing enough to protect its students.
“They (the criminals) could have snatched my daughter… and still no one would have known,” she told POST.