A South African man, whose name has not been published, was carjacked, robbed, and stuffed into the trunk of his car near Johannesburg on Sunday. The robbers, however, had overlooked his mobile phone, which he used to text his girlfriend, Lynn Peters. From there, Twitter took over.

Two armed men grabbed the driver and his Volkswagen Golf in the Honeydew area northwest of Johannesburg at about 9:00pm local time. Carjacking is a crime that is common in the country—over 10,000 such incidents occurred last year.

Peters immediately tweeted, "Be on the look for DSS041GP my boyufriend [sic] has just been hijacked and is in the boot please RT."

RT they did, including Peters' friend, Tanisha Reddy. From her it was picked up by well-known SA Twitterer, @pigspotter, who retweeted it to his 100,000-plus followers. @pigspotter specializes in identifying and sharing the location of police roadblocks. The police forces in South Africa have frequently been accused of graft and violence, so it does not seem to be criminals alone who make a point of avoiding roadblocks.

Because @pigspotter's followers include a large number of private security forces, whose vehicles are spread around the country, the Golf was located. Units were notified and in many cases sent out, each team and company retweeted the specifics of their search and kept each other apprised and informed on Twitter.

@afritrack asked if the car was equipped with electronic tracking (it was not.) A volunteer security group called Riga Rescue offered to track the victim's cell signal. The security company K9 Security eventually visually identified the car. The kidnappers were ultimately stopped at a police road block in Ventersberg, 150 miles from where he was taken.

The kidnappers ditched the car and fled on foot. The driver was rescued, unharmed, from the car trunk. "Done and dusted ! :-)," tweeted Riga Rescue, "Good ending ! This time ! Sleep tight !"

The incident was noteworthy for how fast information about it traveled, how many people responded and for the positive outcome. There was a palpable sense in the South African blogosphere of optimism and well-earned self-congratulation.

Tweeted @ProudlySA, "You guys took Ubuntu to a new level tonight! We're proud of you!"

This isn't the first time Twitter has been used to save lives and secure freedom. High-profile cases have included that of James Buck and Mona Eltahawy, who both tweeted their arrests in crowd situations by security forces. Eltahawy's situation spread like fire via the hashtag #freemona.