South African officials are considering whether to grant diplomatic immunity to Zimbabwe’s first lady, Grace Mugabe, after she was accused of assaulting a model at a hotel in Johannesburg.



The wife of Zimbabwe’s 93-year-old president, Robert Mugabe, is accused of attacking Gabriella Engels, 20, with an electrical extension cord.

Engels had been visiting the Mugabes’ sons, Robert and Chatunga, at the Capital 20 West hotel in Johannesburg’s upmarket Sandton district.

Police put border posts on “red alert” on Thursday to stop the first lady fleeing and said she would not receive special treatment. It is not clear whether Mugabe entered South Africa on a personal or diplomatic passport. Legal experts said she would not be entitled to diplomatic immunity because she had been in South Africa for medical treatment.

But a government source in Pretoria, the country’s administrative capital, told Reuters that there was “no way” she would be arrested.

It is expected that a grant of diplomatic immunity would be challenged in court.

AfriForum, a South African rights group, which is advising Engels, said it would be a disgrace to grant diplomatic immunity, which would allow Mugabe, 52, to return to Harare.

“The government has two responsibilities: one, to protect its own citizens and two, to act according to the law. And the granting of diplomatic immunity would transgress the law,” the chief executive of AfriForum, Kallie Kriel, said.

Willie Spies, another lawyer with AfriForum, said: “Should an erroneous decision be made to grant diplomatic immunity in this case then we would consider bringing an urgent application to the high court.” AfriForum has said it would also consider a private prosecution.

Photographs posted on social media showed a cut to Engels’ forehead, which reportedly required 14 stitches. She claimed to have more injuries on the back of her head.

Engels has said she “did not lift a finger on the first lady” and told local media: “We were chilling in a hotel room, and [the sons] were in the room next door. She came in and started hitting us. She flipped and just kept beating me with the plug, over and over.”

The South African model said she had not known who her attacker was until the alleged assault was over. “I was surprised. I had to crawl out of the room before I could run away,” she said.

Accusing the first lady’s bodyguards of standing by and watching during the alleged assault, Engels said: “The front of my forehead is busted open. I’m a model and I make my money based on my looks.”

Engels appeared at a press conference on Thursday wearing a large plaster on the left side of her forehead. Her mother, Debbie, said it would be “very sad” if Mugabe was allowed to leave the country.

Gabriella Engels at a media conference in Pretoria on Thursday. Photograph: Themba Hadebe/AP

Gerrie Nel, the prosecutor who secured a murder conviction against the Olympic and Paralympic track star Oscar Pistorius, and who is representing Engels, said her “family has been approached by a third party to accept an amount of money to settle this”.

They were told “let us talk and this can go away”. He added: “The family is not interested in doing this.”

Requests for comment from Zimbabwean government officials have gone unanswered. The South African government has restricted all official comment to the police ministry.

South Africa, which is home to an estimated 3 million Zimbabweans, has been powerless to prevent its northern neighbour’s economic and political decline over the last two decades. Enraging Zimbabwe’s president by hauling his wife before the courts would only reduce its influence further, analysts said.

President Mugabe, who had already been scheduled to visit Pretoria this week for a southern African regional summit, arrived two days early to help resolve his wife’s legal problems, a source said.

South Africa’s justice minister, Michael Masutha, told Reuters this week he was involved in discussions over the issue.

The Engels incident is not the first time Grace Mugabe has been in legal hot water. In 2009 a photographer in Hong Kong alleged that she and her bodyguard had assaulted him.

Mugabe regularly speaks at political rallies and is seen as a possible contender to take over from her increasingly frail husband, who has ruled Zimbabwe since independence in 1980.