Inside the secret KwaZulu-Natal hideaway of alleged IS acolytes
At first glance you don't notice the Arabic inscription on the wall of a concrete outbuilding on a secluded hilltop in northern KwaZulu-Natal.
It is when you look closer at the ramshackle house in the Ngoye Forest Reserve, near Eshowe, that you get a sense of why the secret hideaway of alleged Islamic State acolytes Sayfydeen del Vecchio and his wife, Fatima Patel, has become the epicentre of an international terror probe.
It was there that Del Vecchio and Patel, and Del Vecchio's two young daughters, had removed themselves from prying eyes, living off the grid with a field of vegetables to sustain them.
It was there that police and counter-terror agents were drawn in the search for kidnapped Cape Town botanists Rod and Rachel Saunders, Britons who have been living in South Africa for 40 years...
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