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Aids boy's robbery ordeal

His foster mother, Gail Johnson, said the robbers broke in early on Monday, held up a nurse who was watching over Nkosi and threatened to shoot her if she made any noise.

Ms Johnson said she thought Nkosi, who has Aids-related brain damage and has been semi-comatose since early January, had witnessed the robbery.

Ms Johnson said she believed she scared the robbers off when she woke up and ran to Nkosi's room to see what was happening.

"I don't know what this is going to do to him, as he saw everything," she said. "I am very angry and scared. This is a tragedy.

"They covered the nurse with a duvet and pointed a handgun at her and told her that she had to keep quiet, otherwise they would shoot her."

Dying icon

Ms Johnson said she had asked for police protection, but had been told there was a shortage of manpower.

"I am going to have to organise 24-hour security now," she said. "They are lucky I don't have a gun, otherwise I would have killed them."

Nkosi was born HIV-positive in Johannesburg in 1989 and given just nine months to live, but he survived and on 4 February turned 12.

The schoolboy became a leading public figure in the fight against HIV and Aids in 1997 after a group of parents opposed his admission to school because of his HIV status.

At last year's World Aids Conference, he made a moving plea to President Thabo Mbeki to give victims of the disease anti-retroviral drugs.

However, today Nkosi can no longer speak, walk or eat.

Some 70,000 children are born HIV-positive in South Africa every year. The country is thought to have between 500,000 and 800,000 Aids orphans.