British botanists murdered and fed to crocodiles, South African trial hears

Botanists were in remote area looking for seeds when gang beat them to death and dumped bodies

CAPE TOWN, South Africa — A pair of respected British botanists were beaten to death by a South African gang and their bodies thrown in a river to be eaten by crocodiles, a court has been told.

Rod Saunders, 74, and his wife Rachel, 63, were attacked in eastern KwaZulu-Natal province four years ago as they searched for wild seeds to sell via their worldwide mail-order business.

The couple were killed shortly after they were interviewed for an episode of the BBC’s Gardeners’ World program and pictures taken of them with Nick Bailey, its presenter, are said to be the last photographs of them before they disappeared while searching for rare gladioli seeds in the Drakensberg mountains in February 2018.

Sayefundeen Aslam Del Vecchio, 39, his wife Bibi Fatima Patel, 28, and their lodger at the time, Mussa Ahmad Jackson, 35, appeared at Durban High Court, where they have denied kidnapping, murder, robbery and theft.

Rod Saunders and his wife, a trained microbiologist, were co-owners of Silverhill Seeds, a Cape Town company that sold seeds and books. They spent months each year scouring remote mountains and forests in the country for specimens.

The couple, who had been married for more than 30 years, left their Cape Town home in their Toyota Land Cruiser on Feb 5, to meet a BBC crew 900 miles away in the mountains.

After being interviewed by Bailey, they headed off to camp by a dam in a remote forest. Employees of Sliverhill Seeds said they had last been in contact with them on Feb 8.

Mail Online reported that the court was told: “Around Feb 10 the investigating officer received information that Rodney Saunders and his wife, Dr. Rachel Saunders, from Cape Town, had been kidnapped in the Kwa-Zulu Natal region… it was established, on Feb 13, that the defendants were drawing money from various ATMs, which amounted to theft of R734,000 and there was the robbery of the Saunders’ Land Cruiser and of camping equipment.”

The couple are believed to have been killed between Feb 10 and Feb 15 in the Ngoye Forest, north of Duban which is on South Africa’s east coast.

Mussa Ahmad Jackson made a statement alleging that he was woken by his co-accused, Patel, at their home on Feb 10 and that he was told to meet Del Vecchio, the third defendant, on the road. “Del Vecchio in the Land Cruiser and Patel and Jackson followed to the Tugela River Bridge where they helped him remove sleeping bags from the back of the Toyota and they threw them, with human bodies inside, into the river.”

The badly decomposed and partially eaten bodies of the victims were found days later by fishermen.

At first they were not linked to the missing couple but months later police, who could find no trace of the missing couple, ordered all unidentified or unclaimed bodies to undergo DNA tests and the Saunders’ bodies were identified.

Del Vecchio and Patel were arrested at home in Endlovini, 30 miles from the Ngoye Forest, after police allegedly linked their mobile phones to phones that belonged to the murder victims.

The trial continues.