IN BRIEF NEW MPUMALANGA HEIST AN armed gang of four men and four women escaped with cash and jewellery to the value of about R400 000 in a heist at Aventura holiday resort at Blyde Rivierspoort in the Pilgrims Rest district of Mpumalanga on Thursday morning. The gang arrived in a minibus at about 7am and held up staff, who were forced to open the resort’s offices and safe at gunpoint, Mpumalanga police spokesman Captain Izak van Zyl said. They looted the safe and made off in the minibus in which they arrived. No arrests have yet been made.
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Two security guards were killed on Tuesday in a gunfight with armed robbers who stole R30 000 in a cash-in-transit robbery on the BarbertonBadplaas road in Mpumalanga just after noon.
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Meanwhile, police on Friday announced that another two suspects were arrested and a “substantial” sum of cash seized this week in connection with last month’s R10-million robbery in Marble Hall, Mpumalanga, which claimed the lives of six security guards. This brings to five the number of people arrested after the robbery, acting national commissioner Morgan Chetty said in a statement in Pretoria. The two will appear in the Pretoria Magistrate’s Court on Friday morning with their three co-accused for a bail application.
BURUNDI REBELS KILL HUNDREDS A COLUMN of up to 1 000 Hutu rebels launched an attack on an army base outside the Burundian capital Bujumbura on Thursday in a burst of fighting that left at least 150 civilians dead, officials said. After battling for several hours with heavy artillery fire, the Tutsi-dominated army beat back the Hutu rebels, but not before at least 30 rebels and two soldiers had been killed, Lieutenant-Colonel Mamert Sinarinzi told Burundian radio. The rebels then retreated north through Gitaramu village, where at least 150 civilians, also Hutus, were killed, said Jean-Luc Ndiziye, Burundi’s ambassador to Britain.
FORMER NIGER PM HELD POLICE in the West African state of Niger on Friday arrested former prime minister Hama Amadou, who has been accused of orchestrating an alleged plot to assassinate President Ibrahim Bare Mainassara. On Thursday, four people shown on television as detained suspects accused Amadou of being “the brains behind the plot” to kill Mainassara, two ministers and a number of senior civil servants. Amadou at present leads a prominent opposition party in the arid and impoverished country.