Inanda boy snatched on the school run: three men get seven years, and his family says it is not enough
Lindokuhle Mthokozisi Thabede, Mvelo Khuzwayo and Fisokuhle Mbatha have begun serving their terms at Westville, while the child's relatives say the trauma and the fear have not gone away.
Three men have begun serving seven-year prison terms for snatching an 11-year-old Inanda boy on his way to school and demanding R1 million from his mother, a sentence the child’s family has called too light.
Lindokuhle Mthokozisi Thabede, 29, Mvelo Khuzwayo, 29, and Fisokuhle Mbatha, 32, were sentenced in the Ntuzuma Regional Court this week and are serving their terms at the Department of Correctional Services Westville, in KwaZulu-Natal.
The kidnapping happened on May 18, 2022, in Inanda, north of Durban. The boy was being driven to school when the men took him, and they also kidnapped the driver, forcing him into the boot of a car at gunpoint.
One of the accused contacted the child’s mother that day and demanded R1 million, telling her the child would be killed if she did not pay. She went to the police, and under police surveillance handed over R90,000. Officers stopped the vehicle the men were travelling in and were then taken to the house in Inanda where the child was being kept. The ransom money was recovered.
The court heard that the men first asked for R5 million and brought the figure down before settling on R1 million.
Sentencing did not end the family’s ordeal. Gabisile Mbatha, a relative of the victim, said the sentence was too lenient and that the family fears the men will be released on parole after a few years.
“It was totally unfair. The boy is not coping at school because of the trauma he went through. We want to discuss among ourselves how to challenge the court ruling. We had to relocate to another area because of the fear we have,” Mbatha said.
Magistrate Sibongiseni Cele said during sentencing that the men did not use violence against the child or harm him, that this showed they were not bad people and could still be rehabilitated, and that money was the motive. That account of the magistrate’s remarks was carried by Isolezwe.
Prosecutor Kaystree Ramsujh told the court that ransom and extortion cases in KwaZulu-Natal are on the rise and that this was a highly organised and strategically planned kidnapping and ransom. She said the gravity of the offence lay in the child victim, who was traumatised and had to come into court and relive the experience, which she described as secondary trauma.
The men received seven years for two counts of kidnapping, covering the boy and his driver, and six years for extortion. The court ordered that the sentences on counts two and three run concurrently with count one.
A neighbour of the child was arrested in connection with the case after cellphone evidence linked him to it. He appeared alongside the three other accused and was released on bail, and on October 5, 2026, the court found him not guilty.
As IOL reported on October 15, the three men were sentenced for kidnapping the boy in Inanda.
Kidnapping is not a distant problem in this country. South African Police Service crime statistics for April to June 2026 record 4,251 kidnapping cases nationally, with Gauteng accounting for 2,267, KwaZulu-Natal 821 and Mpumalanga 237. Of those, 140 cases in Gauteng and 48 in KwaZulu-Natal were ransom cases, the category this Inanda matter falls into.
Those figures are the state’s own count, and they cover a single quarter. They do not measure how many families pay, how many cases are never reported, or how many children are taken on the ordinary trip to school. What they do show is that ransom kidnapping is being recorded often enough in Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal that it is no longer an aberration in the statistics.
For parents in Inanda and across Durban’s northern corridor, the case turns on details that are hard to put out of mind. The boy was taken during a school run, in daylight, with an adult driver present. The driver was overpowered at gunpoint. The demand came to the mother’s phone the same day.
The National Prosecuting Authority and the South African Police Service have not yet responded to questions from The Enquirer about the sentence, about the family’s intention to challenge it, and about what the recorded rise in ransom cases in KwaZulu-Natal means for how these matters are investigated and prosecuted.
The Enquirer is putting those questions to the NPA’s KwaZulu-Natal division, to the office of the provincial police commissioner and to the Department of Correctional Services, and will report the answers when they are received.
