A white South African game farmer says three gunmen tortured him and his wife for about three hours at their cottage near Hartbeespoort Dam, cutting around her nipples with a knife and tin snips and clamping his testicles in a bolt cutter, before shoving his own AK-47 into his mouth and pulling the trigger. It misfired.
"That AK-47 has been faulty for the last two years. It never fires the last round. It didn't go off, otherwise I would have been dead now," Les Brett, an anti-poaching ranger and founder of the Dung Beetle Bush School, told The Citizen in an interview published Thursday.
Brett said three men came through a sliding door of the couple's home on the game farm in Broederstroom, North West province, at about 7:30 p.m. on Sunday, Nov. 1, and moved "with almost military precision. Within two seconds, I had a gun to my head and a gun to my stomach."
The men tied the couple's hands behind their backs and their feet together, blindfolded them, stuffed rags into their mouths and began beating them while demanding the keys to the safe and money. About half an hour in, one of them took off Brett's blindfold so he could see his wife, Natasha, lying next to him. Their clothes had been cut off.
"They wanted me to see what they were doing to my wife. They were cutting around her nipples with a knife and tin snips. They also had a bolt cutter and put my testicles in it," Brett said. "All this to intimidate and scare us. Eventually I told them where the key to the safe was."
Once the attackers had the guns from the safe, they wanted cash. They kept demanding "the million," threw the couple into the safe and poured boiling water on them, Brett said. He offered them his cars and offered to withdraw money from an ATM; they refused both and insisted on "the millions in the house that we didn't have." Between the beatings, he has said, they also shocked the couple with a taser.
"They then said I had to die, and pulled the trigger on the AK-47, but it misfired," he told The Citizen.
The men fled when a guard on patrol came by to check on the farm's water pump. "They just closed the safe door and disappeared," Brett said. Natasha freed herself and then him, and he went to the farm's main house to call for help.
Brett, who has spent more than four decades in the bush in conservation and anti-poaching training, said his head and knee were smashed with the bolt cutters and his hip is fractured. "We are okay. Natasha is a strong woman. I am still in pain."
Natasha was not raped, Brett told South African YouTuber Riaan Roux, correcting reports that said she was; she is 58, not 68 as first reported. He has said the men threatened her with sexual violence but did not carry it out.
Police registered the case as a house robbery. North West police spokesperson Sgt. Kelebogile Morake said the men took seven licensed firearms and ammunition from the safe, and provincial police commissioner Lt. Gen. Arthur Peter Adams condemned the attack. No arrests had been reported as of Nov. 12.
The Broederstroom raid came four days after Donovan Marx, a 50-year-old cattle farmer between Potchefstroom and Ventersdorp, was shot in the upper body, dragged into his house, tied with cable ties, stabbed and beaten, police spokesperson Capt. Majang Skalkie told TimesLIVE. His attackers cut off both of his earlobes, according to EWN. Police have since arrested five suspects, aged 26 to 56, on charges of house robbery, attempted murder and illegal possession of firearms and ammunition.
On Oct. 5, 55-year-old Hannetjie van Zyl died after she was attacked with an iron bar at the gate of her farmhouse near Ottosdal. "The use of firearms and the brutal assault of an individual in the course of a robbery are serious criminal acts that will not be tolerated," Adams said of the Marx attack.
Pretoria's line is that farm attacks are ordinary violent crime, not a campaign against white South Africans. The Trump administration disagrees: Trump cut off US aid to South Africa in February 2025 and offered white farmers a fast track to the US, as we reported, and the first Afrikaner refugees left for America that May. Last week Washington said it will suspend South Africa from the duty-free African Growth and Opportunity Act from Jan. 1, 2027.
"They stole seven firearms, two cellphones and a laptop, but left cameras worth over R200,000, jewelry, wallets, cars," Brett said, rejecting the police's label. "This is a targeted farm attack. Nobody gets tortured for three hours, scalded with boiling water, in a house robbery."