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Holidaying vandals who posted film of themselves spray painting graffiti from Cape Town to northern Namibia on Instagram have allegedly been identified and shamed following some tenacious investigating by locals.
The defacing of a colonial-era railway station in the world’s oldest desert so incensed Nrupesh Soni, 37, that he set about tracking down the culprits via their social media. By matching the tags daubed on the abandoned Garub station, in the Namib-Naukluft national park in western Namibia, to hashtags and check-ins on Instagram, he claims to have uncovered the gang’s trail.
After Mr Soni, a travel consultant, posted his detective work on Facebook last week, word soon spread and reported sightings of the visitors and evidence of their alleged activity began flooding in. Not only had they disfigured landmarks, but their social media feeds threw up footage of terrified birds and animals taken by drones they had illegally flown over some of Africa’s most pristine areas of wilderness.
“What started as a quick look into their identities has now become a national call for them to be held responsible,” Mr Soni told The Times.
With the help of people in Namibia who came into contact with the four tourists, he claims to have identified two of them: Eric Dang Pham, a Canadian aged 37, and Aurelian Malvolti, a Frenchman aged 35. The other two are also said to be from France and one was identified with his graffiti tag. The four alleged perpetrators could not be reached for comment yesterday.
Mr Soni contacted the authorities in France and his findings made the front page of Le Progrès in Lyons, where some of the alleged wrongdoers are thought to live.
Although officials in southern Africa have yet to announce any action, the accused are feeling the full force of the continent’s ire. They have had to shut down their websites after copies of their identity documents were shared online. Acquaintances who had supported their alleged crimes with tags and shares, and businesses, including a paint shop, that condoned them have also quickly gone offline or scrubbed evidence from their pages.
The French newspaper linked two of the tags shown in the vandals’ African escapades — “Soli” and “JAB” — to a known graffiti group in Lyons called JAB. A number of its members were fined in 2016 for causing €1 million of damage to train carriages, stations and motorway bridges.
Mr Soni, who lives in the Namibian capital, Windhoek, found videos showing the alleged culprits jumping fences in Cape Town to spray walls at a harbour, at train and bus stations, on road signs and on a flyover. Once they had crossed into Namibia, the gang filmed themselves driving along a tourist route, taking in the Namib desert, where they shot video as they defaced Garub station.