The man who allegedly abducted and murdered eight-year old Tazne van Wyk abused his own son so badly that the child died.
Moyhdine Pangarker (54), abducted his son, also named Moyhdine, from his mother’s house in Ladismith in the western Klein Karoo, Western Cape, in 2001.
Between April and June 2001, he repeatedly abused him, hitting him with a belt, an open hand or on his head.
On June 15 that year, Moyhdine died of his injuries.
Pangarker was initially charged with murder but was later found guilty of culpable homicide and kidnapping.
He served eight years of a 10-year jail sentence before he was released on parole in October 2016.
He was ordered to remain in Ladismith for the duration of his parole, but he later moved to the Elsiesrivier, a suburb in Cape Town, where he lived with his brother-in-law when he visited.
Tazne’s parents, Terence Manuel and Carmen van Wyk, live in a Wendyhouse outside a block of municipal flats in Dark City, as the area in the Connaught neighbourhood in Elsiesriver is known.
From their front door, one can see the shop run from a light green flat where Tazne was last seen alive on February 7. It was in this flat that Pangarker lived sometimes.
Manuel said that the last time he saw Tazne he had asked her: “Mummy, where are you going now?”
She shouted back: “I’m going to buy two fivebob entjies [cigarettes]!”
“I thought it was for her grandmother, but it was actually for that gemors [rubbish] … ,” said a distraught Manuel.
A day before Tazne’s disappearance, the department of correctional services had declared Pangarker an absconder, after unsuccessfully trying to track him down in the southern Cape. His criminal record goes as far back as 1981 and includes convictions for culpable homicide, car theft, theft, assault, child neglect and housebreaking.
At the weekend angry community members demanded answers a why he had been released on parole so “quickly”.
There was pandemonium during Pangarker’s first court appearance in the Goodwood Magistrates’ Court in Cape Town on Friday.
A furious crowd tore down the gate at the court and police reinforcements had to be called in.
A house in Parow, a suburb where Pangarker allegedly held Tazne hostage for three days, was set on fire. The community calls it a hoerhuis (whore house). Three suspected drug dens were also torched by the protesters.
Manuel said he wanted to know from his daughter’s alleged murderer: “What went through your brain? You could have just left Tazne somewhere and said: ‘There is your child. Even if you did whatever to her, man. Why did you have to kill her? Why?”
Late last year, Tazne’s parents moved her to a primary school that was closer to her home “because of the gangsterism, so she would be safer and then here she gets murdered,” said Manuel.
“Tazne said she wanted to go to school here with her darra and mamie, because here it is safer, because here there are police. She said gangsters were just running around the school and through the classrooms.”
Said Van Wyk: “She was a very happy little girl, she was respectful,” adding that her daughter had “leadership qualities”. “Her teacher, who only knew her for a short time, said that the whole school was traumatised [by her murder].
The eldest of three girls, Tazne wanted to work at Shoprite one day “because there are so many chocolates”.
Manuel said his child was never rude. “She was an example to her sisters and the children around here, you understand. She had already received eight prizes in school.
“She didn’t deserve this. Look, we’re not perfect, but we raised our children well. What we didn’t have, we gave to her, to all our children.
“Dirty hands bring clean money … until she was eight-years-old and then a monster comes and takes her away from us. Verstaan jy? (Do you understand?)”
Pangarker was arrested in Cradock in the Eastern Cape on Wednesday. The next day, he pointed out the place near Worcester where Tazne’s partially decomposed body was found.
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