A YORK woman told today how car-jackers made her lie face-down on the ground at gunpoint in South Africa.

Angela Garnett, an animal scientist who has just returned home to York after working for seven months in southern Africa with lions, leopards and antelopes, said she thought at first the robbery was a hoax.

"It was surreal," she said. "They were so calm. There was no shouting like you see in the movies. I half expected someone to come running up shouting 'April Fool!'

But it became clear it was no joke after she was forced to lie on the ground with a gun pointed at her head and she was asked if she had any money.

Then the manager of a nearby backpackers' lodge was pistol-whipped across his face after he came running out and started screaming.

Angela said two of the robbers were later shot, one fatally, and the others were all arrested after fleeing the scene and being pursued in a 70km high-speed car chase.

Angela, 36, of Foxthorn Paddock, Badger Hill, said the carjackers struck after she had driven a minibus full of American veterinary students to the lodge from Johannesburg Airport.

"People thought at first that they were staff from the lodge who had come to help us. I was pulling bags out of a trailer at the time and didn't know what was going on. Then I saw the others on the ground and lay down as well. Everyone was very calm.

"They were a very professional gang. It turned out they had held up the niece of Walter Sisulu (a leading figure in Nelson Mandela's African National Congress) the week before."

Angela said she had not been frightened during the robbery. "I think my parents, Ken and Sue, were far more frightened when they heard about it!"

Angela said she had been much more scared on one occasion during her work, when a tranquilised buffalo had woken too early and looked set to charge her, sending her fleeing for her life and clambering over a fence.

The former Queen Anne School pupil said she loved travelling, and had worked in the past in Australia, South America, Jordan and India, but had never experienced any crime like the car-jacking before.

Updated: 10:30 Monday, November 15, 2004