RECENTLY, South Africans were told about an extraordinary escape story – they learnt that a convicted rapist, Thabo Bester, had been at large for a year after he’d escaped from a privately-run maximum security prison. In May 2022 the Department of Correctional Services reported that he had burnt to death in his cell. But a forensic report – which prison authorities only released recently after dogged reporting by journalists at the news outlet GroundUp, showed that the body wasn’t his. Journalist Ruth Hopkins. Ilse van Velzen Bester was re-arrested in Tanzania over the Easter weekend and arrests have been made…