Two internationally renowned botanists were brutally beaten to death before being put in sleeping bags and thrown to crocodiles in a river in a remote South African reserve, a trial for their accused killers has heard.
According to the Daily Mail, a British couple — Rod Saunders, 74, and wife Rachel, 63 — were targeted by a gang in 2018 as they searched for rare seeds for their successful mail-order business based in Cape Town.
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Court heard the couple’s badly decomposed bodies, which had been eaten by the reptiles, were unrecognizable when they were pulled out of the water by fishermen.
Eventually police used DNA on all unidentified or unclaimed bodies in morgues to identify them.
Sayefundeen Aslam Del Vecchio, 39, his wife Bibi Fatima Patel, 28, and their tenant Mussa Ahmad Jackson, 35 have all been charged with their kidnap, murder, robbery and theft at Durban High Court which they have denied.
A fourth suspect, who bought the couple’s cell phones, got a suspended sentence in return for evidence.
The Saunders left their Cape Town home on Feb. 5, 2018, to meet a BBC documentary film crew for an episode of Gardener’s World in the Drakensberg Mountains in Kwa-Zula Natal which was the last time they were seen.
The trial continues.
