2010-10-06 Lizamari de Klerk, 25 and pregnant, in police cell on trumped-up charges

Pretoria - Twenty-five-year-old pregnant Afrikaans woman Lizamari de Klerk was thrown into police cells on Wednesday on a trumped-up 'fraud charge' dating to 2005. rs De Klerk says she knows nothing about the claimed check-fraud and neither the docket nor the investigating officer could be found. She has lived at the same address for the past five years, her phone number has not changed yet she was plucked out of a line waiting to board a flight to Namibia and dumped in the airport police cells. She was detained in a STOREROOM at the Sinoville police station near Pretoria on Wednesday-afternoon. However Beeld newspaper journalist Hilda Fourie cited SAPS spokesman Ben Strydom as claiming that her dates back to a 2005 warrant for the Afrikaans woman about an alleged 'check fraud'.Mrs De Klerk told Beeld - speaking through a small window of the storeroom - that since the warrant was issued five years ago, she has reported three cases to the police, bought two vehicles, opened two bank accounts and was abroad on honeymoon earlier this year.She has been living at the same address for the past five years and her telephone number hasn't changed.Yet in all those five years, the police never bothered to track her down nor informed her about the outstanding warrant.Mrs De Klerk was arrested on Wednesday morning as she was about to go through customs at the Johannesburg International Airport when she and her husband Riaan were planning to board a flight to Windhoek, Namibia for business."No-one wanted to tell me anything. The more I asked them what was going on, the ruder they became. We had to find out on our own that it has to do with cheque fraud."Her deeply upset mom, Mrs Vikki Terblance, 52, said when she heard her daughter had been arrested on Wednesday, the only thing she felt was disbelief."My child isn't a crook." Mrs De Klerk, who is four months pregnant, had to spend Wednesday night behind bars and is scheduled to appear in the Pretoria North Magistrate's Court on Thursday.