Mangaung Correctional Service Facility, a private prison managed by multinational security company G4S, is trying to hide another secret after its officials allegedly assaulted Peter Frederiksen, a Danish prisoner known as a genital mutilator, hours before he died last Sunday.
G4S, which is paid R44-million per month to manage the private prison, told the Department of Correctional Services this week that Frederiksen collapsed and died of heart attack, but prisoners in the facility claim he was beaten to death by prison officials.
Sunday World can reveal that the Department of Correctional Services has launched an investigation into the circumstances around Frederiksen’s cause of death.
Correctional Services spokesperson Singabakho Nxumalo confirmed yesterday that the
department was probing Frederiksen’s death.
“The Department of Correctional Services confirms having received a death notice of inmate Peter Frederiksen, incarcerated at Mangaung Correctional Centre. The report before the department indicates that the inmate collapsed and was declared dead by the doctor on 15 September 2024.
“Relevant structures were informed. The cause of death is yet to be determined. Therefore, we have launched an investigation in this regard,” Nxumalo said.
However, prisoners who spoke to Sunday World on condition of anonymity contest Frederiksen’s collapse and death, as well as the doctor’s visit to his cell.
According to the prisoners, Frederiksen passed away last Sunday in cell 29 of Buckley Hall Unit, Street 7, Mangaung Prison, following an alleged assault by G4S officials.
One prisoner who claims that he was an eyewitness, says he saw Frederiksen being assaulted and beaten to death around 17:30 to 18:00 last Sunday.
“Firstly, the G4S officials said he died of a heart attack and then changed their story to say he collapsed and died. The Judicial Inspectorate for Correctional Services must investigate Frederiksen’s questionable death. He was killed.”
The prisoner also claims that “perpetrators returned to the crime scene on Monday morning to tamper with evidence”.
“We saw the very same perpetrators coming from the front offices and going straight to the crime scene to tamper with it.
“We haven’t seen Department of Correctional Services officials or members of the police, even forensic officials or a doctor, going to the scene of the crime since,” our mole said.
The prisoner claims the prison facility is now claiming that Frederiksen died of a
heart attack.
“Even the medical staff in the centre did not attend to that scene, and the deceased’s body was carried out by the perpetrators,” he added.
Frederiksen was serving two life sentences after he was found guilty of 36 offences, including raping a minor and killing his wife, Anna Matseliso Molise, who was originally from Lesotho, in November 2017.
Police were responding to a domestic dispute in September 2015 when they found 21 packages containing parts of women’s clitorises, as well as surgical equipment, in
Frederiksen’s freezer in his house in Bloemfontein, in Free State province.
Molise was the state star witness against her husband but she was shot and killed in her home in Maseru, Lesotho, “because she knew too much”.
Frederiksen was arrested weeks after that.
Mangaung Prison made headlines in 2022 when Thabo Bester, who was serving a life sentence for murder and rape, escaped from the maximum-security facility after faking his death by burning a body in a cell.
Bester and his celebrity doctor girlfriend, Nandipha Magudumana, were arrested in Arusha, Tanzania, in April last year and deported back to South Africa, where they are facing trial for the string of crimes they allegedly committed.
Mangaung is the second private prison in South Africa managed by a multinational for the government.
The department told parliament last year that it would terminate the G4S contract and run the facility itself, but the company took them to court to protect its multimillion rand contract.
