Crime spree since beginning of century

AS THE afternoon drew to a close on Sunday, November 27, last year, Warrant Officer Colbern Mashego, a member of the Hawks narcotics bureau, parked his vehicle among the warehouses near OR Tambo’s cargo section and waited.

Mashego, a community activist in Vosloorus south of Boksburg, had received a tipoff about a drug trafficking ring that he had been investigating for months.

Rogue police officers would escort a vehicle packed with confiscated drugs out of the airport to a hideout.

A little before 6pm Mashego spotted the vehicles he was looking for and called for back up. But he couldn’t wait. He had to make his move before the vehicles disappeared.

The details of what happened next are unclear, but what is known is that there was a chase and Mashego pulled the officers off the road on the corner of Jones Road and Web Street, not far from the Emperors Palace casino.

When the back-up arrived, Mashego and a police officer were dead. A police sergeant in uniform, who tried to flee, was arrested nearby.

The Hawks’ version of events is that Mashego approached the vehicle and was wounded in a shootout with the officer, who then shot himself in the head – twice.

Matthews Sesoko, the chief of investigations at the Independent Police Investigative Directorate, drew murmurs of disbelief when he described the case to Parliament’s police committee in February.

The Hawks and police were involved in a war over confiscated drugs, he said.

“What we find odd is that the officer shot himself twice,” Sesoko said. “He shot himself below the chin and then in the side of the head. How is it possible that a person commits suicide and shoots himself twice like that?”

Ipid’s investigation found that mules who bring the drugs into the country are never arrested and that only the drugs are taken. It appears that there is a war as to who will get the drugs first, Sesoko said.

Mashego’s case is one of a string of crimes committed at OR Tambo, which has been lucrative for organised crime since at least the start of the century.

One of the first to expose the crookery at then Johannesburg International Airport was the investigator Paul O’sullivan, who was behind the successful prosecution of former police chief Jackie Selebi.

O’sullivan took over as head of security at the Airports Company South Africa in 2001 and went to work in eradicating rampant drug-running and corruption at JIA.

But O’ Sullivan was fired in January 2003 after he insisted against Selebi’s will that the airport security company, Khuselani Security, have its contract cancelled.

Since then OR Tambo is said to have become a crime haven for petty thieves and organised criminals.

In one of the more prominent cases in March 2006, 24 men armed with AK-47S stole R100 million from an SAA plane at OR Tambo International Airport.

It was later found that airport staff had helped plan the attack. After a six-year trial, seven suspects were tried and sentenced for their involvement in the heist.

In the second half of 2001, at the then-named Johannesburg International Airport, $6.5m was stolen from a Swissair cargo plane, and almost $10m from a KLM cargo plane.

At least six other major incidents were reported at the airport last year.

Apart from heists, gangs at the airport also frequently tail travellers as they leave the airport and hijack them in their driveways as they arrive home.

The airport was in the news again on Tuesday after a slick, highly organised team of robbers, disguised as police officers, drove straight through security check points and pointed guns at guards as they were about to load millions of rands in foreign currency onto a South African Airways plane before it was due to fly to London.

The brazenness of the operation has again raised suspicion about whether the incident was an inside job.

Robbers used access cards to open gates and gain access to the tarmac. They then escaped through the same entrance at the airport with blue lights flashing on their vehicles.

SAA said the heist happened in an area of the airport only cleared for personnel with the appropriate access tags.

What is worrying is that access and highly sensitive information is so easily passed on to gangs by staff and security teams at the airport.

The drug smuggling, heists, murder and petty crime in the warehouses and cargo areas around OR Tambo and apparent failure to do anything about the incidents for 17 years simply reinforce public distrust of the security services.