SOUTH AFRICA: A white South African teenager who says he was kidnapped by a maid and raised as a herd boy in a rural black township was being kept in seclusion yesterday as police investigated his tale of abduction and abuse.
Citing child welfare laws, officials ordered a news blackout in the case of the blond youth, who goes by the name "Happy Sindane" and is fluent only in the African language of Ndebele.
"He's in a place of safety at this stage," said a Justice Department spokesman, Mr Heinrich Augustyn.
Sindane appeared at a police station in Bronkhorstspruit, west of Pretoria, on Monday and told officers he had been kidnapped by a black domestic worker at the age of six.
Now believed to be 18, Sindane spoke to several reporters on Tuesday before officials blocked media access.
According to media reports, Sindane said he had only a "movie-like" memory of his life before the alleged abduction, saying he recalled that his family spoke Afrikaans and lived in Johannesburg.
Sindane said he was kidnapped by the family's maid, who turned him over to a couple who took him to a rural area where he lived for the next 12 years, eventually in the care of an older man he referred to as his grandfather.
Yesterday the Afrikaans-language Beeld newspaper reported that one white Pretoria family believed Sindane might be their son who disappeared in 1992 after going to a cafe to play videogames.