OWN CORRESPONDENT, Cape Town | Thursday 8.30pm.
THREE people have been detained for questioning in connection with Tuesday night’s bombing at Planet Hollywood in Cape Town in which one person died and 27 were injured.
Detective-Superintendent John Sterrenberg told the eM&G that police, responding to an anonymous tip-off, detained a man and two women as they were boarding a flight to Egypt at Cape Town International airport just before 4pm on Thursday afternoon. The three were already on the tarmac, and were brought back to the departure hall. They are being questioned and have not been formally charged. Sterrenberg said that police have yet to check the veracity of the tip-off.
SABC3 reported that the vigilante group People Against Gangsterism and Drugs (Pagad) has confirmed that one of the suspects is a Pagad member.
Earlier on Thursday Pagad released a statement in response to the bombing which said: “We hope that the police will make swift progress in bringing the perpetrators to book and we trust that the community will co-operate with the police.”
At the same time, Pagad reiterated that it condemned attacks by the United States in Sudan and Afghanistan.
President Nelson Mandela, visiting the scene of the blast on Thursday, rejected calls for the reintroduction of the death penalty, saying that in the apartheid era it affected mainly black, coloured and Indian people and relatively few whites.
“Deep in the thinking of the people who demand the death penalty is the fact that it is going to affect blacks, not whites,” Mandela said at a press briefing.
Nowhere in the world had the death penalty brought down the crime rate, Mandela said. “That type of vengeance does not help us.”
What was needed was an efficient police force, he said. “And I believe that our police force has that efficiency, that skill, that integrity.”