The distressed woman (who can not be named, because she is a victim of a sexual assault) claimed she was raped by a taxi driver, while his friend was robbing her.

“It was so dark in the bushes. After they threw me out of the taxi, I walked until I saw a road and then walked from house to house to get help.”

At one stage she saw a taxi coming up the road. She was afraid that it might be her attackers and hid behind a wall.

She stopped at a house where she saw a door was open and kept on screaming. The people in the house looked through the window and saw the sobbing woman who was dressed in only a bra top and a piece of her crop top which she folded around her waist.

“A man stopped next to me, pointed a gun at me and asked me what am I doing there. The people of the house then came out and they saw that something was wrong and asked him to put away his gun.”

They called the police, who came about an hour later, took her to the bushes to show them where the incident happened and then took her to the Middelburg Hospital where rape tests were done.

The hospital staff told her to come back to get antiretroviral medication, but she is too scared to take a taxi to go to the hospital.

“I do not sleep, I am so scared the whole time.”

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She told www.mobserver.co.za what happened to her on Friday night.

According to the woman she took a taxi in Tokologo (Mhluzi) to meet a friend in town.

In Chocolate Street they told her to get out because they must go somewhere else. She climbed into another taxi and saw that the only people in the taxi were the driver and another man.

When she got in, they said they just want to stop quickly at a tavern, close to a filling station (on the corner of Beyers Naude- and Protea Street).

Back in the taxi, she saw that they did not take the route via Beyers Naudé to town, but instead drove in the direction of Kanonkop in Protea Street. They said with this route they will not be stopped by traffic cops.

At the Walter Sisulu Street robot, they turned left towards Loskopdam and she got really scared. She asked them about it, but they locked the doors and said: “it is a shortcut, be quiet, you are talking too much!”

She could only sit powerless and see how they drove into an area (she does not know Dennesig) and then turned left onto a gravel road.

“When they got onto the gravel road, I tried to open the door, but the one hit me with something in the face. It was dark, so I do not know if he hit me with a fist or something else.”

She said she lost consciousness for a while and when she woke up, the taxi driver was on top of her in the taxi.

“The other guy undressed me and the driver screamed: ‘If you do anything, or try to escape, I will kill you!’ I pleaded for my life and told them that I have a child at home. I did not fight them, I was too scared. I just wanted to live for my child.”

She remembered that one of the attackers could not get her shoes off her feet. He also went through all her belongings in her handbag and took all her clothes, her cell phone and the R340 in her wallet.

• The woman said that the driver of the taxi wore a Covid-19 mask, but the other man did not have anything over his face.

“The rapist never took off his mask. It was dark in the taxi, so I cannot remember their faces.”

What she can remember is that both men were between 28 and 21, of small build and dark-skinned.

“The one without the mask wore a white T-shirt. The taxi driver was wearing a jersey.”

• She asked www.mobserver.co.za to thank the young woman who comforted her on the scene, while they were waiting for the police.