Prominent businessman Prosper Mkwaiwa and his wife Tina survived a harrowing ordeal on Friday night. The couple were relaxing in their room at the Morula Sun Casino in Mabopane, north of Pretoria, when a man brandishing a gun entered their room. He had followed Prosper’s wife Tina from another room in the hotel, sneaking in behind her.

“I thought the guy was escorting her because he followed her into the room but I was wrong,” Prosper told the Sunday World newspaper. The gunman, dressed in a security uniform, forced the couple to lie on the ground. He then pointed out that he plans to kill the couple and himself.

“He then took the magazine out and said ‘you see I’m removing other bullets from the magazine and only three will remain in it,” said Prosper. “One is for you, one for her and one for me’.”

When the couple pleaded for their lives and asked what he wanted, the robber had a very strange demand: the couple must have sex in front of him.

“He said ‘I want you guys to make love in front of me’,” said Tina. “Imagine me undressing and making love to my husband in front of him! I was so scared. That man is sick upstairs. Why would somebody do that to us? We don’t have enemies.”

The man made it clear that he knew who they were. The couple pleaded with him for over an hour, to no avail. In the end it was Prosper’s quick actions that saved them.

“As I was talking to him he kept on moving the gun from his left hand to his right one and then from the right to left one. It’s like it was too heavy for him,” he explained. “When he repeated that we should make love in front of him, I jumped and grabbed the hand that was holding the gun. A bullet went out and hit her in the leg. He then turned the gun towards me and shot me twice in my right leg.”

Prosper managed to wrestle the gun from their attacker, who then appears to have stumbled and bashed his head against the room’s glass door. The assailant fled the scene and is still at large.

“I’m glad I rescued my wife and we are both alive,” Prosper told the newspaper. “You can imagine what could have happened if I hadn’t grabbed the gun from him. He would have probably shot and killed us.”

The couple were rushed to Legae Medi-Clinic, where they are being treated for shock and gunshot wounds.

By James Francis