By: The Guardian
A South African woman has been sentenced to life imprisonment alongside two accomplices for trafficking her then six-year-old daughter, in a case that gripped South Africa and gained international attention after the girl went missing last year.
Racquel “Kelly” Smith, her boyfriend, Jacquen Appollis, and their friend, Steveno van Rhyn, were convicted of kidnapping and trafficking Joshlin Smith, who disappeared from her home in a small township in the Western Cape in February 2024.
Joshlin has still not been found, despite an extensive police search. During the trial, a witness said Smith had told her she had sold her daughter to a sangoma, a traditional healer, for 20,000 rand (£830) and that the girl had been desired for her “eyes and skin”.
Another witness, a pastor, said Smith told him in 2023 that she planned to sell her daughter. “There is nothing that I can find that is redeeming and deserving of a lesser sentence than the harshest I can impose,” the high court judge Nathan Erasmus said. Erasmus also imposed a 10-year kidnapping sentence on the three, to run concurrently with the life sentence for human trafficking, and ordered their names be entered into the child protection register.-The Guardian