Highway robbers turn N3 into hell

Garage attendants no longer turn a hair when bleeding victims come for help

● The stretch of highway where transport minster Sindisiwe Chikunga and her entourage were hijacked and robbed this week has been commandeered by roving criminals who terrorise motorists after dark.

Gangs use blue lights and other police equipment to trick motorists into pulling over. At other times spikes are spread across the road to cause flat tyres.

This week, three victims told the Sunday Times how they were recently robbed on the same stretch of the N3 — and they claim police made no effort to track down their assailants. One victim spent three days in intensive care after being beaten in the face with a pistol.

The N3 between Leondale in Ekurhuleni and the Gauteng town of Heidelberg has been named as crime hotspot by Gauteng police, who have for years been asking that street lights be installed.

It is a vital link between Johannesburg and eThekwini with more than 13,500 vehicles travelling on it every day. It is especially busy during the festive season, when up to 1,600 vehicles an hour pass through the toll gates.

Police minister Bheki Cele told the Sunday Times this week the spate of armed robberies was a relatively new phenomenon on the N3. He said he was aware that the use of spikes to bring vehicles to a halt was now rife on the N3 and that the gangs were targeting motorists at night.

“I have not been briefed about the blue light gang on the N3 that is also targeting the public, but it will be on our radar because every South African deserves to be safe,” said Cele. “I don’t take what happened to the minister lightly, but such things are bound to happen to us, and we will feel exactly how ordinary South Africans are subjected to by criminals.”

Chikunga was held at gunpoint by armed men while her police bodyguards were changing a flat tyre after having driven over spikes on the N3 near Heidelberg at about 4am on Monday.

The Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse (Outa) has warned that if the problem is not addressed, motorists will have a right not to stop when real police with blue lights try to pull them over.

Outa CEO Wayne Duvenage said: “In due course the public will have a right to not stop when the police stop cars on the freeways.”

Sandton businessman Gavin Morton spent three days in intensive care after he and a colleague were pulled over near Heidelberg at about 7pm on August 31.

Morton, 62, was travelling in his Toyota Prado when he was stopped by a vehicle fitted with blue lights.

As he reached for his driving licence, four men — two wearing police uniforms — told him he was being hijacked before tying his arms with cable ties. His colleague’s wallet was taken and about R30,000 was withdrawn the same night after the criminals demanded the PINs for his bank account.

Morton was severely injured after being hit in the face with a pistol. He opened a criminal case with police after he was discharged from ICU.

“It wasn’t pleasant. This has changed and affected the way I see things and has changed the way I think. You never recover from something like that,” Morton said.

Morton’s case was transferred to the Grootvlei police station in Mpumalanga, in whose jurisdiction the crime was commit

ted. About two weeks later he received a text message stating the docket had been “closed”.

“All leads followed up — case closed. Docket will be reopened upon new leads,” the text read.

Morton, who was never contacted by the investigating officer, does not believe any investigation took place.

“If police are not willing to do something, who else do you go to?” he asked.

He said that after the attack, he and his colleague managed to get to a nearby petrol station, where the staff said such attacks were regular occurrences.

“They told us that this happens every day, every night. We walked in there, I was bleeding but they weren’t even surprised,” Morton said.

Two hours before Morton was waylaid, a family of four from Pretoria were hijacked in the same area and held in the veld at gunpoint for several hours by criminals who stopped them using a car fitted with blue lights.

The father, who asked not to be named, said he was travelling with his wife and two young children in a Ford Raptor bakkie when they were pulled over by a VW Golf 7 fitted with blue lights.

The men in police uniform asked for his driving licence before pulling their guns and telling him he was being hijacked and should do as they ordered.

“The officials were all pointing guns at us, then they tied my hands with a cable tie and grabbed my gun from my waist. Then I was thrown in the back seat with the kids and my wife,” the man stated in his police statement.

The attackers drove them to an open field where they took their cellphones and wallets before driving off in their bakkie.

“I, still to this day, haven’t been contacted by any investigating officer handling my case,” the man told the Sunday Times this week.

The only contact he received from police was a text message a week ago alerting him that his firearm had been registered as stolen.

“I have a physical street address of where my [vehicle] was last pinged in Katlehong and no-one bothered to investigate it... It’s fruitless, I don’t want to put my family through that thing again,” the man said.

In a third case, a 40-year-old Durban businessman was robbed on the N3 near Vosloorus at about 8pm on September 29. As in the case of Morton, when he ran to the nearest garage people working there knew exactly what had happened before he said a word.

“I was bleeding from my lip because I did try resisting, my face was swollen... Those at the garage told me that this happens regularly,” he told the Sunday Times.

Asked why Morton’s docket was closed after just two weeks, Mpumalanga police spokesperson Brig Selvy Mohlala said: “The commander will reopen the case and contact the complainant on Monday.”

In April 2021, Gauteng police commissioner Lt-Gen Elias Mawela wrote to the national department of transport, the then Gauteng premier David Makhura and the provincial department of roads & transport asking for high-mast street lights to be installed to improve safety on “identified roads or hotspot areas”.

Mawela listed 10 stretches of road across Gauteng, including the N1 south between Naturena and the Vaal River, the N4 east between Pretoria and Bronkhorstspruit, the N3 south between Leondale and Heidelberg and the N17 between Wemmer Pan and Devon.

But national transport spokesperson Collen Msibi said there were “no immediate plans to extend freeway lighting into low-population-density areas due to the high risk of vandalism and theft of copper cables during load-shedding”.

“Sanral [South African National Roads Agency] is looking at solar options as potential solutions in the future,” Msibi said.

Gauteng roads & transport spokesperson Melitah Madiba said the department was procuring a service provider to install and repair street lights on provincial roads. “This is a three-year programme and it is anticipated that the implementation will commence in the last quarter of this financial year,” Madiba said.

Gareth Newham, head of justice and violence prevention at the Institute for Security Studies, said the criminals operating on highways were “often enabled by corrupt police”.

“They sell the equipment to criminals, it’s not just blue lights, it’s police uniforms and bulletproof vests and police radios,” Newham said.

The best way to deal with the crime was to urgently improve crime intelligence capabilities, he said. “We are a long way from improving crime intelligence and dealing with police corruption. Unless we do that, this will be an ongoing problem.”

Guy Lamb, an expert on crime and violence prevention at Stellenbosch University, said the use of blue lights was a big problem. “All police can do is increase visibility and seek to gain informants to get a better understanding how the criminals operate.”