Durban — The Umlazi SAPS conducted a crime awareness campaign during a holiday camp at the Mangosuthu University of Technology.

This was in a bid to empower young men to be strong male role models in addressing and ending gender-based violence and femicide.

Lessons shared with the young men in attendance were that they should lead by example, irrespective of their circumstances and many challenges.

Police in this precinct have, over the years, investigated a number of GBV and femicide cases, some of which were committed on the premises of the university’s student residency.

Last year, student Xolile Mbatha was stabbed multiple times and died as a result at one of the institution’s outsourced residences.

She had been a final-year electrical engineering student and was murdered by her boyfriend, Bongani Sanele Mlambo, in July while they were in a bathroom at the Ark Royal residence on Mahatma Gandhi Road in Durban.

Mlambo pleaded guilty to the murder and was sentenced to 22 years imprisonment in the Durban High Court.

In 2020, Thabani Mzolo was found guilty of the murder of student Zolile Khumalo.

Khumalo was shot three times by Mzolo while in her room at Lonsdale student residence in the Durban CBD on May 1, 2018.

Khumalo was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder.

In 2019, Siphandla Sangweni,28, was charged with the murder of his girlfriend 24-year-old Ayanda Ngcobo.

Ngcobo, who was a journalism student at Rosebank College, also shared a son with Sangweni.

Their son was seven years old at the time of the murder. Ayanda’s body was found with visible assault wounds on her chest at Sangweni’s house, in his room in the township’s J section.

The couple’s son was found unharmed in the same room as his mother’s body.

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