by JANE FLANAGAN, Daily Mail

A British woman was repeatedly raped at gunpoint during a savage 14-hour ordeal after she and her boyfriend were kidnapped at a South African beauty spot.

Now she faces a nightmare wait to see if she has been infected with HIV in a country where Aids is rife.

The couple were blindfolded and bundled into their car by four thugs and driven for 200 miles.

The only stops were when the gang visited illegal drinking dens and when the 29-year-old woman was raped.

As the attackers got more drunk, they invited other drinkers from shanty town shebeens to come and taunt their two white victims trussed up in the back of the vehicle.

The men grew increasingly violent as the night wore on, stabbing the 26-year-old South African boyfriend in the leg and beating him repeatedly.

The couple were told that they would be driven over the border to Mozambique and their bodies dumped.

They escaped only because their attackers lost control of the car and it overturned. The tourists scrambled out of the wreckage and fled.

A passing motorist, who stopped to help after seeing the crash, was shot dead and his passenger wounded as the attackers tried to steal their car.

The rape victim, from Gloucestershire, has told friends she feels she is under 'a death sentence' from Aids.

She has been prescribed anti-Aids drugs. But it will be months before doctors can say if she has been infected.

The Foreign Office said yesterday it was reviewing advice to visitors to South Africa, and especially Mpumalanga province where the rape happened and where a British woman was shot dead in a robbery last month.

The rape victim arrived in South Africa two weeks ago for a three-month visit.

She and her boyfriend had stopped at a picnic spot on Long Tom Pass in the Drakensberg Mountains when they were attacked on Saturday. It is one of the country's busiest tourist routes - and the scene of a coach crash in 1999 which killed 26 British holidaymakers.

Piet Posthumus, a family friend of the victim, said: 'This is the worst thing in the world for her. She is so traumatised by the possibility that her life is now under threat because of what has happened.'

He added: 'A pistol was fired a couple of times as a warning and at least once it was fired through the floor of the car where they were lying.

'Who knows how this would have ended if the car had not crashed.'

'You have to understand that it is just not safe to get out of your car in South Africa any more.'

The ordeal ended when the driver went off the road near Barberton, 50 miles to the south.

The couple later spotted two men they believed were part of the gang as police drove them away from the scene.

The men, a South African and a Zimbabwean, are expected to appear in court today accused of rape, abduction and murder.

Nick Sheppard of the British High Commission in Pretoria said travel advice was being reviewed in view of the rape and the murder of Briton Diane Conway in Mpumalanga last month.

Mrs Conway, 60, was shot dead after she and her husband confronted an armed robber in their hotel room.

Mr Sheppard said 'These are very serious incidents so we have to examine our options.

'But 300,000 Britons visit South Africa each year and these two incidents are the worst over the past two years involving British tourists.'

With a favourable exchange rate, attractive climate, safari parks, beauty spots and beaches, South Africa has become a tourist magnet.

But it also the most violent society in the world, with the highest rates of murder and rape. Tourists are seen as soft targets by young men who have easy access to weapons.

There are almost 20,000 murders a year - 60 times more than in Britain.

Nearly 50,000 rapes were reported to police last year, but the true total is estimated at 30 times more.

The charity Childline says a girl born in South Africa is more likely to be raped in her lifetime than learn to read.

South Africa also has the highest number of people in the world with Aids or carrying the HIV virus. Some estimates put it at a quarter of the population.