MTHATHA, South Africa — A man accused of murdering an 82-year-old Idaho-born nun in South Africa, where she had worked among the poor for about 60 years, was arrested June 19.
Sr. Mary Paule Tacke, a Missionary Sister of the Precious Blood, was kidnapped in Mthatha June 15, and her body was found the next day, dumped in a stream about 50 miles east.
An Mthatha police spokesman told local journalists that the unnamed suspect was found in a house in a nearby village by members of a police team set up to find the nun’s killers. No further details were released.
Sr. Tacke, a native of Cottonwood, Idaho, came to South Africa from the U.S. in the 1950s. She taught for many years in Ikhwezi Lokusa, a poverty-stricken area outside Mthatha, and was living in the Glen Avent Convent there.
Mthatha is the capital of the Eastern Cape, one of South Africa’s poorest provinces.
