Marianne Merten
Tit-for-tat killings have hit the Cape Flats, as a complex net of revenge attacks unfolds in the ongoing violence between rival gangs, and between gangsters and anti-drug vigilantes.
Saturday’s attack on members of a social and soccer club in Hanover Park – in which one man was killed and at least 20 people injured – is the latest in a series of bloody retaliations which police battle to control.
Residents had gathered on a pavement with members of the club to hold a braai. Two cars came down the road and the passengers opened fire on the group before speeding away.
It is unlikely investigators could have picked up many clues. News of the shooting reached the police more than an hour later when the Hanover Park Day Hospital asked for help.
When detectives finally arrived at the scene, they were handed a plastic bag of spent R-5, 9mm and .454 cartridges which one reservist had carefully picked off the ground.
Police and soldiers had been deployed in Mitchells Plain following the murders of the local Dixie Boys gang leader, Junaid “Jango” Joseph, and the son of alleged Tafelsig People against Gangsterism and Drugs (Pagad) leader Abdul Heuwel.
Before the Hanover Park attack, Operation Good Hope’s attention was on the killings of Jerome Petersen and Chantine Veldsman, daughter of Americans gang leader Glen Khan who was shot on Easter Sunday.
Perhaps the clue to the recent spate of murders lies with one of the Mitchells Plain American gang leaders, Igshaan Marcus, who was among those taken to hospital after the attack.
Marcus moved to his mother’s Hanover Park home after his wife, Ferosa, and his mother-in-law, Adielah “Mama America” Davids, were killed in April. Alleged Pagad hitman Ebrahim Jenneker has been arrested in connection with the murders.
Jenneker was arrested after Adielah Davids’s bakkie was found outside a house in Brooklyn days after she was killed. The house belongs to a drug dealer whose daughter married into Jenneker’s family. Police took the drug dealer’s daughter into protective custody during a visit to her husband in jail. She was spotted wearing Adielah Davids’s jewellery.
Tensions between Pagad and the Americans have sporadically boiled over in Mitchells Plain since an alleged Pagad attack on Americans gang boss Kadika Madat’s house in April last year. Pagad national co- ordinator Abdus Salaam Ebrahim will stand trial in November in connection with the shooting. Since the charges were laid, Madat’s house has been pipe-bombed and shot at several times. In retaliation, the home of Pagad’s Faizel Steyn has been shot at and the Heuwel family threatened.
Abdul Heuwel’s son, Moegamat Rezzah Heuwel (17), was shot four times and died two weeks ago. Abdul Heuwel has blamed the police for leaving him defenceless as they confiscated all the family’s firearms. He says it is widely known that gangsters have put out contracts on Pagad members.
One member of the Americans gang, Jonathan Alexander, has already appeared in court in connection with Moegamat Heuwel’s murder.