Police have arrested a 44-year-old woman for attempted murder after she allegedly assaulted her five-year-old nephew and dumped him inside a pit toilet.

The woman from Ngojini village in Cofimvaba, Eastern Cape, will appear in the Cofimvaba magistrate’s court today. 

Police spokesperson Brig Thembinkosi Kinana said the woman was arrested on Thursday after the incident. The boy spent several hours inside the pit toilet and survived with injuries.

“She allegedly sent the child to one of the bungalows in the yard to get a pencil. She then followed him and that is when the child said she started beating him. She covered him with a blanket and ordered the boy not to cry. She also tried to strangle him with a rope before dumping him in a pit toilet,” Kinana said.

The boy's 15-year-old sister heard screams from the pit toilet after he was said to have gone missing the day before while playing with other children. 

The-15-year-old said she asked her brother who had thrown him in the toilet.

“I was about to relieve myself in another toilet when I heard a voice calling out my name in the other toilet. I was shocked to see my brother, who said our aunt threw him in the toilet after he strangled him. The first thing I did was to take him out of the toilet and bathe him,” she said.

A relative of the woman said the family was disturbed by this atrocious act.

“He is doing fine at the moment because he has been playing with other children. He is only left with the marks around his neck where he was strangled by the aunt. Unfortunately, his mother left him about a month ago to go and look for employment and we have never heard from her since then,” she said.

“She [the aunt] just arrive from Cape Town and we don’t know what could have led her to do this. We suspect that she might have thought he was dead after beating him, which is why she threw him in the toilet. As a family we will go to court to fight for her not to get bail.” 

Zwelethu Makuleni, the principal at Ngojini Primary School, where the boy is a Grade R pupil, said the incident was disturbing.

“We received a report on Thursday about what happened. I immediately rushed him to the clinic so that they could check him and the police were called. He was stinking of human faeces even though his sister bathed him. At this stage the aunt is denying that she committed this horrendous crime,” Makuleni said.

Petrus Majola, director of the Khula development centre, which advocates for children’s rights, has called for justice to take its course.