CLAIMS THAT COPS ARE IN GANGSTERS’ POCKETS
• In 2011 cops start monitoring Alfonso Cloete, a Western Cape police officer, as it is suspected the Mobsters, a faction of the 28s gang, have recruited him. He later denies being a gangster.
• Suspected 28s boss Ralph Stanfield is arrested in 2014 along with two relatives and three Central Firearm Registry police officers. The case, based on allegations that police created fraudulent gun licences for criminals, is provisionally withdrawn and later reinstated. is murdered in Cape Town. Stories surface that corrupt cops are working with the Mobsters.
• In mid-2016, former police colonel Chris Prinsloo pleads guilty to selling about 2,000 guns that were meant to have been destroyed, allegedly to a businessman accused of smuggling them to Western Cape gangsters.
• At the end of 2018, Anti-Gang Unit cop Charl Kinnear complains to bosses that certain police officers in the Western Cape, some with links to Crime Intelligence, are working to frame him and some of his colleagues, and that some are aligned to an organised crime suspect, Nafiz Modack. (The Independent Police Investigative Directorate later finds Kinnear’s complaints are valid.)
• In September 2020, Kinnear, also investigating allegations that cops are fraudulently creating gun licences for suspects, is assassinated outside his Cape Town home. Among those arrested in connection with his murder are Modack and a colleague of Kinnear’s, Anti-Gang Unit cop Ashley Tabisher.
• An October 2022 high court judgment warns that evidence suggests 28s gangsters have infiltrated the Western Cape’s cops, even at management level. Investigations are launched.