Rescued Ethiopians were living in filthy, derelict house

Two mattresses pushed against the wall, a wooden chair in the corner of the living room and four rooms that had no furniture but just litter.

This is what was left at a scene of the dramatic rescue where the police's Special Task Force Team tracing victims of a kidnapping for ransom scaled walls.

At the house in Lyndhurst, Johannesburg, they found 90 undocumented Ethiopians who were being kept against their will and living under inhuman conditions.

With unkept grass and different paint colours on outside walls, the house is one of four homes along the quiet Hares Road where neighbourhood watch patrols the streets.

It has grey double garage doors and a wooden door next to it.

There was broken glass outside one of the bedroom windows and the garden had overgrown weeds, uncut tree branches and litter.

Many of the houses in the area have high walls and look old.

Neighbours said the owner of the house had moved out more than a month ago and they had not seen any activity at the house until around midnight on Friday when police scaled the walls.

“I woke up to noise coming from the house and when I looked outside, I saw more than one person trying to get over the walls and immediately thought it was someone trying to steal from it," said one neighbour who asked not to be named.

“I called the security company patrolling the area and they told me that the people I was seeing were the police." 

National police spokesperson Brig Athlenda Mathe said a multidisciplinary team led by the task force discovered the undocumented nationals locked up and confined in the rooms.

“Investigations are under way as to how these nationals were trafficked into SA. Among the Ethiopian nationals was a kidnapped victim who was also rescued.  

“The victim was kidnapped in Benoni on Tuesday afternoon, where after his kidnappers immediately started demanding hundreds of thousands of ransom money from his family,” said Mathe. 

One of the neighbours described how the victims looked unwell as they were walked outside and loaded into police vehicles. "There were many police vans."

The neighbour said the house was once a family home. “One by one they each started leaving. First it was two siblings. He [owner] later said he would be moving out to Greenstone so he would rent out the house.

“A month after he left, we expected people to have moved in already but nothing. There was no-one coming out to leave the waste out for the collectors. There was no movement at all,” said the neighbour, adding that  the number of people found there was shocking.

"It makes one think about your existing neighbours. If 90 people can be hidden here for so long without anyone seeing anything then your neighbour might be up to something but you don't know. I am still shocked," said the neighbour.

Another neighbour said this was the first time something like this had happened in the neighbourhood.

“It’s a very safe and quiet community and to hear that such a thing happened is beyond me because not a lot happen in this community without a neighbour or two finding out about it ... but a group of 90 people found living in one house was very shocking.

"You could walk around here at night and nothing would happen to you. Even if your car were to get hijacked, the car would not leave the perimeter in which the security patrols, it's a very safe neighbourhood and to hear such really makes one think," said the neighbour.

Mathe said two alleged human traffickers and kidnappers who were found on the property have been arrested.

She said they were likely to face charges of kidnapping and human trafficking. The duo is expected to appear in the Palm Ridge magistrate’s court soon.

“The case has been handed over to the Directorate for Priority Crime Investigations [Hawks] for further investigations. This operation would not have been successful without the work of the following units – crime intelligence, organised crime detectives, Sandringham and Daveyton SAPS as well as private security,” said Mathe.