There’s something therapeutic about having an early morning jog – you clear your mind for the day, get your metabolism going, spend some time with yourself. Well, that all changed for one Durban woman when she was targeted by a gang of vicious kidnappers yesterday morning. As News 24 reports, the 37-year-old was grabbed at gunpoint at 5am as she ran past a row of parked cars.

She was forced into the car and taken to her apartment, where the gang of men proceeded to ransack the place.  Things could have ended very badly had it not been for a bystander, who’d seen the kidnapping from his own car and decided to follow them to her place whilst calling the police.

I decided to follow the car and I knew it was serious. I thought they could rape her or kill her. I followed them at a distance and they stopped on Cato Road. I stopped quite a distance away and I spoke to a security guard from a block of flats and he told me that three men had gone inside. I asked him to press his panic button and I had already called the police. Blue security arrived in less than five minutes,” he said.

Armed police arrived, surrounded the place and when the gang realised they were screwed, one came out holding a gun to the hostage’s head. The police let him drive off, but not before shooting out his tyres in a bid to stop him.

When the police arrived they cordoned off the whole place. They [the gunmen] figured out that they had been had. One guy came outside holding her at gunpoint and he kept shouting at the police that he would shoot her.”

The hostage was eventually rescued and the car found abandoned. As yet no-one has been arrested. Phew. You’d be forgiven for thinking I’ve just described the plot of a new action movie, but apparently this was just a Monday morning in Durban.  

We have to hope that this is an isolated incident, but it does go to show how vulnerable lone joggers can be, particularly in the wee small hours.

Read the full eyewitness account HERE.

[sources: News 24 and Times Live]