Cape Town residents hold night vigil after German tourist disappears

CAPE TOWN (Reuters) – Residents of Hout Bay community, close to South Africa’s tourist capital Cape Town, held a candlelight vigil on Wednesday evening as the search continued for a 22-year-old German who went missing during a hike last month.

Five South African suspects, aged between 20 and 25 years, were arrested after being found in possession of items that belonged to the missing Nick Frischke. They appeared in court on Tuesday facing charges of robbery with aggravating circumstances.

Among the items found was a credit card, police said, adding that investigators believe it was taken during a robbery.

The case has been postponed until March 6 for further investigation, the National Prosecuting Authority in the Western Cape said in a statement.

Police said an integrated search operation for Frischke continued as part of investigations and that it was premature at this stage to speculate on what may have occurred.

The world’s most unequal society, South Africa has struggled to contain violent crime, including murder and rape, since the governing African National Congress replaced white-minority rule after the country’s first democratic elections in 1994.

Releasing the latest quarterly crime statistics in February, Police Minister Bheki Cele said of the 7,555 people murdered in the three months of reporting ending December, almost half were shot while around a third were killed with other weapons such as knifes, bricks and “in many cases bare hands”.

(Reporting by Wendell Roelf; Editing by Nellie Peyton and David Gregorio)