Canaan Mdletshe

A Durban mother fears that her teenage daughter who has been missing since April has been kidnapped and is being held as a "sex slave" by local gangsters.

Khanyisile Ngcobo, from Lamontville, near Durban, was last seen being shoved into a moving vehicle while on her way home from school.

Now her desperate mother, Mpume Ngcobo, from Lamontville, is unable to sleep at night and is having nightmares over her daughter's ordeal.

Ngcobo said she had received a call from her 17-year-old daughter last month.

"She was with another girl. She phoned me saying she was kept in a house, but did not know the place, except that it was in J-section, in Umlazi," she said.

Ngcobo went to the area with police but they could not find her daughter.

"On the day she went missing she had left school late because she was doing her matric and was attending late classes, but she never reached her bus stop," Ngcobo said.

She said her daughter, a matric pupil at the nearby Wentworth High School, had never slept out before so when she did not return home she became worried.

Ngcobo said when she went to the school to find out what might have happened to her daughter, pupils informed her that a car had pulled over and that Khanyisile had been grabbed by men in the car who pushed her into the car, which then drove off.

Concerned teachers at the school described Khanyisile as a "smart girl" who had been awarded a bursary for next year, but had now missed all her exams this year.

Ngcobo reported her daughter's disappearance to the Wentworth police station.

Police spokesman Daniel Veldhuizen said that detectives were still investigating the case, but they had not yet come up with any leads.

Veldhuizen said that there had been no other cases of girls being kidnapped for sex reported to the police.