Suspect in Nurses Rape Horror Nabbed, Chuene Clinic Remains Closed
A suspect has been arrested for the robbery and rape of two nurses at Chuene Clinic outside Polokwane. The 27-year-old parolee is expected to appear in the Polokwane Magistrate Court on Monday.
The man was arrested at his home at Feke in the nearby Ga-Maja village on Saturday after being on the run for eight days.
Limpopo premier Dr Phophi Ramathuba accompanied by Health MEC Dieketseng Mashego, provincial police commissioner Lieutenant General Thembi Hadebe shared details of the arrest at a media and community briefing at the Chuene Clinic on Sunday.
The suspect was released on parole in November 2024 and has already been linked to a series of crimes in the area, including an attempted robbery at the nearby Thaba Clinic on Friday.
Subscribe to our newsletter
“During the arrest, police recovered a 9mm pistol which had been reported stolen in a previous house robbery involving a female police officer attached to Lebowakgomo police station (on 2 January this year). Additional items found on him include laptops, smart cellphones, a panga and cash suspected to be linked to other crimes in the area including robberies, rapes and other violent crimes,” Ramathuba said.
Clinic remains closed
Provincial police commissioner Hadebe says investigations into the details of the attack are underway.
Meanwhile, Cheune Clinic will stay closed. Ramathuba says while the facility will eventually reopen, around-the-clock care may not resume anytime soon.
Jackson Chuene, a representative of Chuene Royal Council who attended Sunday’s meeting says community members were relieved a suspect had been nabbed.
“We welcome the arrest and genuinely sympathise with our nurses who suffered at the hands of a monster. We are appalled by this heinous crime, but on the other hand, we need primary health care services to resume at our clinic,” says Chuene.
Another resident, Alpheus Chuene, urged authorities to ensure that well-trained security guards are appointed as soon as possible so that the clinic can reopen.
“Most of us are chronic patients and we rely on tablets. Look now I am left with only three tablets and this means I have to travel to Maja Clinic which does not have my records,” he says.
Review of security companies
Earlier, health workers’ unions vowed not to return to Chuene Clinic until armed guards were deployed.
Health MEC, Mashego says the department has established a panel to ensure private security companies contracted to guard health facilities comply with service level agreements, following the brutal incident at Chuene Clinic.
Residents also called on Ramathuba and Mashego to look at the neglected grassy surroundings inside the Chuene clinic yard.
“Doors in most rooms at this clinic do not have working locks and workers use bandages to fasten them. Some windows are broken and toilets are not fixed. Nurses say they report all these to their seniors to no avail,” says Lesetja Chuene.
Mashego promised to ensure the clinic receives the necessary maintenance repairs. – Health-e News
Author
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Unless otherwise noted, you can republish our articles for free under a Creative Commons license. Here’s what you need to know:
-
You have to credit Health-e News. In the byline, we prefer “Author Name, Publication.” At the top of the text of your story, include a line that reads: “This story was originally published by Health-e News.” You must link the word “Health-e News” to the original URL of the story.
-
You must include all of the links from our story, including our newsletter sign up link.
-
If you use canonical metadata, please use the Health-e News URL. For more information about canonical metadata, click here.
-
You can’t edit our material, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style. (For example, “yesterday” can be changed to “last week”)
-
You have no rights to sell, license, syndicate, or otherwise represent yourself as the authorized owner of our material to any third parties. This means that you cannot actively publish or submit our work for syndication to third party platforms or apps like Apple News or Google News. Health-e News understands that publishers cannot fully control when certain third parties automatically summarise or crawl content from publishers’ own sites.
-
You can’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually.
-
If you share republished stories on social media, we’d appreciate being tagged in your posts. You can find us on Twitter @HealthENews, Instagram @healthenews, and Facebook Health-e News Service.
You can grab HTML code for our stories easily. Click on the Creative Commons logo on our stories. You’ll find it with the other share buttons.
If you have any other questions, contact info@health-e.org.za.
Suspect in Nurses Rape Horror Nabbed, Chuene Clinic Remains Closed
by Montsho Matlala, Health-e News
January 20, 2025