Our cops can't be trusted....
Mar 27, 2011
Too many police linked to too many gangsters and killers...
I am afraid of the police. Some of them seem to be at the centre of some of the most heinous crimes and ominous acts being committed in this country at the moment.
But our political leaders don't seem at all concerned about what is happening.
Take the raids by the Hawks last week on Czech fugitive Radovan Krejcir. He entered South Africa on a false passport in 2007 and has been linked to bribery and murder in his own country and elsewhere, including five recent murders in South Africa.
It appears that he has operated with the help of some senior members of our police service. The Mail & Guardian newspaper reported last week that the H awks are investigating claims that senior members of the police's crime intelligence unit interfered with the Krejcir investigation. Central to the investigation, the newspaper said, are former Gauteng crime intelligence boss Joey Mabasa and the head of crime intelligence, General Richard Mdluli.
"The probe is understood to focus on allegations that crime intelligence engaged in extensive phone-tapping of Hawks members and others involved in the Krejcir investigation. The issue of who motivated for this surveillance, who approved it and whether the information was passed on to Krejcir is a key focus of the investigation," the M&G said.
This might all seem a bit random, but consider the fact that President Jacob Zuma escaped standing trial for corruption because members of the now-disbanded Scorpions were illegally bugged.
Recordings of their conversations were released by the acting head of the National Prosecuting Authority, Mokotedi Mpshe, when, in his plagiarised statement, he dropped the charges against the ANC leader and gave him a free pass to the best office in the Union Buildings.
In the case of the Hawks, too, a known underworld figure, already linked to five murders, is allegedly being fed information by members of police intelligence. It does not help that the wife of the same Mabasa implicated above had set up a company with Krejcir's wife.
Further, the M&G has reported that "Mabasa was also the officer who claimed that he received a telephonic confession from former Krejcir employee George Smith (aka Louka) after Smith had supposedly shot (Teazers boss) Lolly Jackson".
So let's connect some dots here.
At the beginning of this month, two crime intelligence officers raided the office of the Public Protector after she had released a scathing report about national police commissioner Bheki Cele's role in the dodgy police headquarters tender deal in Pretoria, in which a friend of Zuma's stands to make a whopping profit.
The two policemen, a Colonel Maluleka and a Captain Nkuta, had visited the Protector's offices and demanded a document referred to in a Sunday Times report. There was no official request and it remains a mystery, a month after this outrageous incident, who ordered the men to violate a Chapter 9 institution.
So, in just one month, you have two extremely worrying incidents. First, Hawks investigators going after a bad egg are themselves snooped upon and perhaps then threatened, and secondly, the Public Protector is menaced by the faceless manipulator behind two crime intelligence officers.
Let's take this further. Celebrated writer and Sunday Times columnist Jonny Steinberg wrote on February 13: "Those who rear puppies to be lethal attack dogs ought to ask themselves this: once the dogs are trained to kill, who will control them? Five years from now, will you still be the one who decides whom the dogs do or do not maul?
"General Bheki Cele has not been asking himself such questions of late, at least not rigorously enough. In 2009, he formed a new police organisation called the Tactical Response Team. It is a large body with units across the country, each staffed by about 100 officers. Their job is to apprehend suspects considered armed and dangerous .
"I suspect the units have another purpose, one that you will not find in any policy document.
"They are there to send a message: 'Live by the gun, the message goes, and you risk dying by the gun. For, if your activity warrants our attention, we will go after you, and we are loath to take prisoners'.
"I make this claim because it can be inferred from the ways in which team members are already in trouble with the law.
"Eleven officers have been charged with murder after a man in Inanda, in KwaZulu-Natal, was allegedly beaten unconscious in front of his 11-year-old child."
Let me connect those dots again.
Claims that investigators are being spied on and information passed to criminals . the Public Protector is 'visited' and her office's further investigation of corruption is essentially chilled.
Finally, ordinary people can be murdered by elite teams - remember the "shoot to kill" injunction? - which sounds ominously like the hit squads that dominate some South American countries.
This is how the rot sets in.
