Bushiri Responds To Latest Rape Allegations, Claims Extortion
In a lengthy Facebook post, Enlightened Christian Gathering church leader Shepherd Bushiri has responded to the latest rape allegations.
Two women from Bushiri’s church have opened rape cases against Bushiri.
In the Facebook post, Bushiri claims that the allegations are meant to extort him. He said, “For the last 3 years we have been dealing with extortion. A police officer at the Hawks called Phumla Mrwebi has been intimidating women and children to come up with false rape allegations against us. This has been done together with members of the media. This woman comes and demands money from us. The supposed victims come and demand money from us. The shameless journalists also demand money from us. This Mrwebi woman, for the past 3 years, has been running an extortion syndicate against me through sending girls to demand money from us and if we don’t give, she told the girls to go public and accuse us of raping them. We reported the matter in 2018 to several state institutions such as State Security Agency, Inspector General of Intelligence, police commissioners, and including the Independent Police Investigative Directorate (IPID) to bring this woman to justice and leave me alone. No action!”
Bushiri and his wife Mary Bushiri are facing money laundering and fraud charges. The couple appeared in court after Shepherd Bushiri was arrested on 1 February 2019 by the Hawks for charges of fraud and money laundering involving more than R15 million.
Bushiri and his wife were released by the Pretoria Specialized Commercial Crimes Court in February last year on R100 000 bail each, after spending days in prison. The cases against the couple were later transferred to the high court for trial.
In the post, Bushiri also commented on the latest eNCA interview where two of his alleged rape victims share their story. “As we are writing, this woman, working with Mashishi of SANCO, has again recruited several girls to be interviewed by ETV to accuse me of raping them. Some of these girls, secretly came to us, demanding various amounts ranging from 50 000 to 2million Rands to their masters(as aforementioned) in order to stop the story from being aired by ETV. We recorded them and you can see for yourself. Well, we told them we arenot giving a single coin to them to stop ETV from running this story. Etv must go ahead. We are going to sue you and your extortion cohorts. This time we want to show you the power of money and justice. We want to warn every party involved in this syndicate that I have overwhelming evidence of all their doings. A serious legal suit will follow and we will fight”, he said.