A British couple were kidnapped before being murdered and thrown into a river full of crocodiles in South Africa. Three people have been jailed for their murders as well as stealing from their vehicle and a credit card, which was used to make purchases totalling over £32,000.
Rodney and Rachel Saunders, aged 74 and 63, had been searching for rare seeds in the Ngoye Forest in KwaZulu-Natal when they were kidnapped in 2018. The bodies of the couple, who had dual South African and British citizenship, were found in a river days later and a police investigation was launched. Detectives unveiled that they were setting up a camp beside a forest dam when the attackers, who are linked to ISIS, tortured them for their bank account details. The Brits were then hacked, stabbed and battered to death before being cocooned in their sleeping bags and dumped in a river full of crocodiles.
As reported by the Daily Mail, Sayefundeen Aslam Del Vecchio, 46, his wife Fatima Patel, 36, and Malawian national Musa Jackson, 43, were convicted of the murders last month. A Durban court sentenced them to two terms of life imprisonment with concurrent jail time for kidnapping, robbery and theft.
The court heard how Del Vecchio and Patel were linked to ISIS at the time of the crime. Investigating police officers found Islamic State literature and a flag during a search of their home.
They were members of a local gang whose leader and Muslim convert, Del Vecchio, had identified the couple as a “good hunt”. The gang pounced on the Brits and forced them to reveal their bank details, and killed them.
They then set off in the Saunders’s Toyota Land Cruiser while Rachel and Rod were in the back of it. They were then dumped into the river where their bodies were savaged by crocodiles before being washed up.
Investigators managed to find their bodies after following a trail of credit card spending, which led them to the gang. They found heavy blood stains linked to Rachel and Rod inside the 4 x 4.
Post mortems revealed that Rachel had been hacked a number of times to the back of her skull with a machete-like heavy blade and stabbed repeatedly in the upper back. She had also been battered with a heavy blunt instrument that was believed to be the same murder weapon responsible for caving in the skull of her husband, Rod.
After being recovered, their bodies were unrecognisable due to attacks from crocodiles and decomposition. It took two pathologists using DNA and a dental expert to be able to finally identify them.
