Source: The Telegraph
A rape charge filed against one of Nelson Mandela’s grandsons has been provisionally withdrawn after prosecutors said they needed to look at new evidence that had emerged.
Mbuso Mandela, 25, the son of Mr Mandela’s son Makgatho, was due to stand trial on Wednesday accused of raping a 15-year-old girl in a trendy Johannesburg pub last year.
The woman claimed he forcefully kissed her, put his hands in her underwear and then raped her in an alleyway outside Mamma’s pub in Greenside on August 7. She said she had screamed for help throughout.
After several hearings in the case last year, South Africa’s national prosecuting authority said it had decided to withdraw the case for now as they were investigating new evidence.
"We have now obtained new information that requires further investigation," Phindi Louw, a prosecution spokeswoman, said.
"The charge could be reinstated at a later stage, pending our investigation," she said.
Meanwhile the 15-year-old complainant was, she said, "seeking mechanisms to cope with the trial".
A prosecution source told a Sunday newspaper shortly after the incident that the alleged victim told police she had been in a relationship with Mr Mandela but later told him she only wanted a platonic relationship and he "had refused to accept this".
Mr Mandela was arrested in August 2015, and spent 10 days in custody before being freed on bail. He had appealed in an affidavit submitted to the court not to be tried “as a Mandela but as a normal person”.
The large extended family of the anti-apartheid activist who became South Africa’s first black president in 1994 has been in the headlines repeatedly over the years for legal woes over money, property disputes and assault.
Mbuso Mandela’s lawyer argued in a previous hearing that the sex was consensual and that the girl had posted her age on social media as 16, meaning she was over the age of consent.
Prosecutors produced the girl’s birth certificate showing that she was 15 but the accused’s lawyer argued that the name on the certificate differed from the names under which she laid the charge against him.
He also produced an affidavit from a chef working at the pub who said he saw the pair kissing before the alleged rape took place.
Makgatho Mandela was Nelson Mandela’s son with his first wife Evelyn. He worked as a lawyer and died of Aids in January 2005.