Police were 'surprised' by cash heist gang, leading to two deaths

06 February 2019 - 07:00 By JEFF WICKS
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Police have been accused of being unprepared when they clashed with a suspected cash heist gang in northern KZN on Friday night.
Police have been accused of being unprepared when they clashed with a suspected cash heist gang in northern KZN on Friday night.
Image: Elvis Ntombela

A team of elite police officers and crime intelligence agents hunting a cash-in-transit gang were caught unprepared when they drove into an ambush on a secluded stretch of road in the northern reaches of KZN.

Outgunned and taken by surprise, the officers traded fire with a heavily armed gang for nearly 15 minutes on Friday night.

When the shooting stopped, bullet casings littered the tarmac and veld. Two police officers lay dead at the roadside and the bodies of seven gunmen lay scattered in the veld over a 3km radius. Another officer was wounded.

Reliable sources with knowledge of the bloody botched swoop, which failed to prevent the bombing of an armoured cash vehicle, unpacked what went wrong.

“They were surprised. The police didn’t have complete information on the bombing,” said one source.

It is understood that the team of police officers had been deployed to Nongoma days ahead of the planned heist, following intelligence that a gang was going to strike a G4S armoured truck.  

“They were in an area where they suspected robbers were and they observed the [armoured] van. As crime intelligence agents came around the corner far away from the armoured truck they drove straight into the first stopper group,” the source said.

The stopper group - an advanced party of gunmen - sprayed the convoy of police cars with automatic rifle fire.

A colonel from the Crime Intelligence Unit was shot and killed, while a Hawks officer was shot and wounded.

“[The] crime intelligence officer was not prepared for a fight and didn’t even have a rifle as they don’t usually engage,” said the source.

In the skirmish, members of the police’s elite special task force arrived and engaged the gunmen. While volleys of gunfire tore through the night air, the gang successfully bombed the truck. The firefight wore on, with the paramilitary police unit pursuing gang members into thick veld scrub.

Another source with key knowledge of the incident said that when the shooting stopped, police had killed seven gang members: “It was incredibly dark and they were chasing the gunmen into the bush. When everything was done, there were bodies scattered over a huge area.”

Francois Beukman, chair of the portfolio committee on police, said that his committee was of the view that more resources should be allocated to specialised units who need to deal with highly trained and heavily armed cash-in-transit robbers, as well as other high-risk operations.

“The resources should be used in the procurement of appropriate communication, technological and satellite cover, and air support for the specialised units and crime-combatting units. The resources are necessary to enable the units to deal with the complex task that they face every day,” said Beukman in a statement.

“The specialised units of the SAPS face life-threatening and dangerous situations daily and all necessary steps should be taken from a budgetary, logistical and training perspective to support them appropriately.”

Beukman said they would support an increase in the budget for the Specialised Interventions sub-programme of SAPS, which was allocated R4.3-billion in the current financial year.


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