Women dragged from bus and arrested for robbery get R400,000 payouts

Life was hard for Vuyokazi Marwanqana when she boarded a Friday night bus at Park Station in Johannesburg, looking forward to giving birth at home in the Eastern Cape. And it was about to get worse.

Marwanqana was eight months pregnant, she had just lost her job as a security guard, and loading her heavy bags felt impossible.

Then Nomatamzanqa Matshaka arrived to board the same bus, and after helping Marwanqana with her bags the primary schoolteacher stood chatting to her new acquaintance.

Within the next couple of hours, though, the two women had been dragged off the bus by police, arrested for a robbery they were accused of committing eight months earlier and thrown into a police station's filthy cell, where they cried the whole night. They spent the weekend in custody and had to find R2,000 each for bail.

Seven years later, the police have been told to pay more than R400,000 in compensation to each of the women for their unlawful arrest and detention in October 2014.

Johannesburg high court judge Leicester Adams said Matshaka's “random act of kindness ... unfortunately and regrettably turned out with dire consequences for the pair”.

In his judgment on Tuesday, he said: “They felt particularly hurt and their feelings injured by the fact that they were looking forward to a pleasant trip to their hometown, only to be unceremoniously pulled off a bus and arrested. The embarrassment they would have suffered as a result is unimaginable.”

The women's ordeal began when another bus passenger thought they were the same people who robbed her of cash and valuables worth R30,000 in Centurion the previous January.

“She had little doubt about this and she alerted the police,” said Adams. “Needless to say, [Marwanqana and Matshaka] were astounded by this accusation and drew to the attention of the police officers at the bus terminus the fact that they did not even know each other.”

The police asked one of the women to call the other's cellphone number, which did not register as a contact. They allowed them to board the bus but their accuser called her husband and he reported his wife's suspicions to Wierdabrug police station, where the robbery case was opened.

“Warrant Officer Henning of the SAPS Flying Squad, who had been contacted by the Wierdabrug police station, intercepted the bus in Vanderbijlpark,” said Adams.

The women were taken off the bus and arrested. “They were shocked, dismayed and dumbfounded all at once — not to speak of the embarrassment of having been yanked off the bus in front of a busload of passengers who no doubt saw them as troublemakers and the ones responsible for disrupting what should have been a leisurely and carefree bus trip to the Eastern Cape,” said Adams.

The judge agreed with Marwanqana and Matshaka that Henning relied solely on the robbery victim's claim that they had robbed her.

“He had no regard ... to their explanations that they could not possibly have been the pair who robbed the complainant as they did not even know each other before they met at the bus terminus on that particular day,” he said.

“Moreover, he failed to have regard to the fact that the robbery occurred months prior to the identification, which increased — quite dramatically — the possibility that the complainant may have been mistaken.”

Adams said Marwanqana and Matshaka were held in “intolerable” conditions at Vanderbijlpark police station until Saturday morning, then transferred to Wierdabrug police station where they spent two more nights. Marwanqana also spent a night at Kgosi Mampura prison in Pretoria.

After they were freed on bail, said Adams, the case was postponed and the charges were later withdrawn “ostensibly because the complainant was not giving her co-operation and was not coming to court to give evidence”.

The judge awarded Marwanqana damages of R250,000 and Matshaka R290,000, but the 9.5% annual interest the police must pay was backdated to September 2015, meaning each payout will be more than R400,000.

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