HARRISMITH. - MARCH 29. The young Polish woman whose honeymoon ended in a nightmare of murder and rape when her husband was murdered in front of her eyes and she was raped by the murders, will probably be allowed to testify about her ordeal in her own country, Poland, before a local judge.

The young traumatised woman refuses to sit foot in South Africa again, and Advocate Jo Hiemstra, deputy-director of public prosecutions in the Free State and the prosecutor in the case, has applied in the Free State High Court that the 27-year-old woman be allowed to testify in Poland.

"She refuses to set foot in the country where she was so cruelly, barbarically humiliated," the public prosecutor said. Judge G A Hattingh postponed the hearing to June after Hiemstra's request was received.

The court heard about the hell suffered by the young Polish bride by a volunteer worker at the centre for victims' support at Harrismith Hospital, Mrs Caryl-Lynn van Reenen, who was called in by police to assist the traumatised bride on May 24, 2000.

The young woman had been found wearing only a soaked tee-shirt along the road next to the Sterkfontein Dam. When she was brought to the victims' treatment centre, she was curled up in a foetal position, blue and shivering from the cold, her hair was wet and she was coated in mud. She cried constantly.

Initially, she was only able to speak her name, and tell personnel that her husband had been shot and she had been raped. Her entire face and body was covered in scratch marks and her knees and feet had wounds. Her hips and arms were badly bruised and the bruise marks around her neck indicated that her rapists had tried to choke her to death. She managed to walk only with great difficulty.

The Polish embassy staff who had arrived to assist her, had immediately ordered her treated with AZT to prevent HIV-Aids transfer. Two of the three arrested rapists had tested positive for HIV-Aids. The accused rapists, Sipho Enoch Mbongwa (24), and Nathi Edward Malinga (25) of KwaZulu Natal were co-accused with the late Mbongeni Colin Khoza (26) of murdering the Polish husband at the farm dam, whereafter they abducted the young woman, loaded her in the luggage compartment of her rental car and raped her elsewhere.

Mrs van Reenen testified that the raped woman told her how she was raped by each of the three men, who then tried to drown her by stamping on her head to try and keep her head underwater. She passed out and came to to find herself lying on grass with car lights shining in her eyes. In the victims' treatment centre she cried constantly and said she did not want to live without her husband. She was taken to a Pretoria hospital for trauma treatment and returned to Poland shortly thereafter.