The fate of Sheryl Cwele was sealed by an email she sent to drug mule Tessa Beetge outlining flight details from South America, Beetge’s mother, Marie Swanepoel, told the Mail & Guardian this week.
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In an interview in Cape Town, Swanepoel showed the M&G the emails. It was this damning evidence that assisted last week’s sensational arrest of Cwele, wife of State Security Minister Siyabonga Cwele, she said.
Sent from Cwele’s personal email at work on June 4 2008, the correspondence outlines the last leg of Beetge’s trip from Lima in Peru to São Paulo in Brazil, and from there to Johannesburg.
“Email me back for more clarity if you need. Looking forward to seeing you. Missed you so much my darling friend,” Cwele wrote. But the scheduled flights were cancelled and Beetge emailed Cwele saying she was “freezing my butt off in Peru”.
“Frank is telling me to wait and wait and wait, and then when its [sic] time to go, I am ready, and they cancel everything again,” wrote Beetge. “I’m getting a little upset about it because mom is asking questions and saying things I don’t like to hear. I can’t keep telling her I’m coming home and then I don’t.”
An email from Cwele said Nigerian Frank Nabolis had informed her about the delays, “which is for your own good really”. “Keep well and avoid people who may end up asking a lot of questions,” she wrote.
Cwele is director of health and community services of KwaZulu-Natal’s Hibiscus Coast municipality, where she was arrested last week. Nabolis, arrested by the Hawks last December on suspicion of being a druglord, is accused with Cwele of conspiring to import cocaine into South Africa and recruiting young women on the pretext of arranging short-term jobs for them overseas.
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Beetge (31) was arrested two years ago and is imprisoned in the Penitenciaria Feminina Da Capital in Brazil. A mother of two young daughters, she was sentenced to eight years after being caught with 9kg of cocaine worth R3-million in her suitcase.
It was a mother’s love that made the case headline news in South Africa. For two years a visibly exhausted Swanepoel and her family have fought for the arrest of those she claims set up her daughter. She said she had received numerous threatening calls warning her to leave Cwele alone.
“I’ll never give up on my Tessa,” she said. “She didn’t know what she was doing and they conned her. She’s innocent.”
Fifty-eight-year-old Swanepoel has a thick file of correspondence, including copies of all SMSs Cwele sent to her daughter’s phone. After scraping together the funds for the airfare, Swanepoel visited Tessa in prison last year and brought back her cellphone to retrieve all messages for the police.
Hawks spokesperson Musa Zondi said the investigating officer had also visited Beetge in prison. Asked whether Beetge would be brought out to testify against Cwele, Zondi said this was not necessary.
“If needed, she can testify via a link-up,” said Zondi. “But that will be the decision of the prosecution.”
Zondi said the Hawks were not investigating the minister in connection with the case. “We’re satisfied that this issue relates to Mrs Cwele and her alone.”
‘Is she hiding behind her husband?’
In a letter to her mother, dated July 20 last year, Beetge asked why Cwele and Nabolis had not been arrested yet.
“Is she hiding behind her husband? Why is he covering her ass?” wrote Beetge. “Who is to say he isn’t involved, which I’m sure he could be.”
In a written account of events leading to her arrest, Beetge said Cwele had told her she was going to London to do “admin work” and that she was asked to reconcile the books of a company en route. Her mother and father accompanied her to speak to Cwele at the municipality.
After flying to Johannesburg, Beetge was dropped at a “brothel whorehouse” by Nabolis for the night. “I was exhausted, frightened shitless, but they told me they would collect me first thing in the morning.”
Instead of flying to London, Beetge said she was put on a flight to Bogota in Colombia. From there she flew to Lima, where Nabolis instructed her by phone to hand over her bag overnight to “a little guy called Carlos”. She then left for Johannesburg, making the doomed transit stop in São Paulo.
Describing the airport search, Beetge wrote that she saw a little black bag being pulled out of her suitcase. “The detective pulls it out and opens it. It’s full of cocaine.”
Beetge recalled asking herself: “God, why? I’m angry and ready to murder Frank and Sheryl for doing this to me,” she wrote.