OWN CORRESPONDENT, Cape Town | Thursday
THE biggest trial to date of members of the Muslim vigilante group PAGAD began in a South African high court on Wednesday when three men pleaded not guilty to 138 charges including murder and kidnapping.
Ebrahim Jeneker and brothers Abdullah and Ismail Maansdorp are accused of robbing two Cape Town police stations and shooting and wounding two policemen who were investigating case against members of PAGAD (People Against Gangsterism and Drugs), a militant anti-drug organisation founded in 1996.
The government has since labelled it a terrorist group.
The three face a total of nine counts of murder, including killing two of the city’s most prominent gangsters, a businessman, and a drinking hall owner and his wife.
These and the 129 other crimes were all committed between January and April 1999.
The defendants are all members of PAGAD’s G-force, or armed wing, which the government and police say has waged a terror campaign in Cape Town for the past five years.
This included some 140 bombings and the assassination of a magistrate, described by President Thabo Mbeki as an attempt to destabilise the state.
The Cape High Court on Wednesday heard evidence from a policeman whom Jeneker and his co-accused allegedly held up while they robbed the police station in Claremont, a suburb south of Cape Town, of arms and ammunition.
Constable Grisham Williams described how he was pinned to the ground with an assault rifle pointed at his head while the robbers emptied a safe in the police station of weapons and then locked him up in a police cell with his colleagues.
The robbers made off with the cell key and police were obliged to call in a locksmith to free them.
The trial, which is expected to take until at least the end of the year, comes shortly after police linked PAGAD to plans to kill court officers and witnesses. Both prosecutors appeared in court flanked by bodyguards.
The chief investigator in the case, Bennie Lategan, was shot dead by the side of a highway in 1999. Jeneker is awaiting trial for his murder in a separate case.
In March, the Cape High Court sentenced a member of PAGAD to 11 life terms in prison for the murder of 11 people, all of them suspected drug dealers or gangsters. – AFP