Recently, South Africans were told about an extraordinary escape story – they learnt that a convicted rapist, Thabo Bester, had been at large for a year after he’d escaped from a privately-run maximum security prison. In May 2022 the Department of Correctional services reported that he had burnt to death in his cell. But a forensic report – which prison authorities only released recently after dogged reporting by journalists at the news outlet GroundUp, showed that the body wasn’t his.
