The police should be commended for dealing decisively with an alleged kingpin in kidnappings for ransom, who was killed during a shoot-out with the anti-kidnapping task team in Kempton Park, east of Joburg, on Wednesday.
Police said the Mozambican, who was on that country's wanted persons database, was linked to at least five kidnapping for ransom cases in South Africa, as well as cases of housebreaking, carjacking and possession of unlicensed firearms.
There have been several rescues and arrests this year. A foreign national who was kidnapped on August 25 in Willowvale, Eastern Cape, was rescued last week. The kidnapping task team also arrested a 29-year-old suspect on August 29, who faced charges of murder and kidnapping.
Apart from these two successful rescues in the space of two weeks, in June the police task team rescued a 30-year-old kidnap victim and arrested two suspects during an operation in Germiston on the East Rand.
That month police traced a Mozambican kidnapping kingpin to an apartment block in Fourways, Johannesburg. The suspect, linked to several kidnappings, was fatally wounded in a shoot-out with police.
The national anti-kidnapping task team was established in November 2021 after a spike in kidnapping cases where a ransom was demanded. Since its inception, the task team has arrested more than 337 kidnappers, and more than 146 illegal firearms have been seized at these crime scenes.
Despite these successes, sight should not be lost that kidnapping incidents remain on the rise, where the perpetrators, in some cases, demand millions of rand for victims to be freed.
According to SAPS crime statistics, kidnapping in Gauteng increased by 15.8% from 2,085 in the fourth quarter of the 2023/2024 financial year to 2,414 in the same quarter of the 2024/2025 financial year.
Here is to hoping that more resources in terms of manpower and tools of the trade are allocated to the task team, which has shown it is able to tackle this crime scourge
Kidnappers resort to desperate measures to extract ransom from the victims' families. The Sunday Times reported that perpetrators were increasingly using rape and sexual assault of victims — both men and women — as ways to secure quick ransom payouts. The criminals make videos of the assaults and send them to family members.
The DA has claimed that police have access to only one IMSI catcher (phone signal grabber), a crucial tool in tracking kidnappers. It said kidnapping response teams rarely get access to this device, leaving them powerless to locate victims or apprehend criminals.
This concern about the lack of capacitation of the police was also raised by the parliamentary portfolio committee in March, when it said the upward trend in kidnappings required decisive intervention and capacitation of the anti-kidnapping task team.
The head of the task team, Col Ismael Dawood, said in May his team was working with a private security company, which offered its service free of charge, to help with incidents of kidnapping. He said between January 2024 and May this year, his team and Vision Tactical saved about 100 victims and lost one.
While this is welcome, here is to hoping that more resources in terms of manpower and tools of the trade are allocated to the task team, which has shown it is able to tackle this crime scourge.
The arrests should be followed with successful prosecutions and hopefully lengthy sentences which would serve as a deterrent to hijacking rings
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.