Marianne Merten
Lack of communication between various intelligence agencies is one factor leading to failed undercover operations and repeated claims of police involvement in gun-running.
“The intelligence agencies in South Africa are not communicating with each other. The one doesn’t know what the other is doing,” says Institute of Security Studies researcher Ettienne Hennop.
The Mail & Guardian last week exposed the alleged sale of weapons to People against Gangsterism and Drugs (Pagad) by serving members of the Soweto flying squad. But Hennop said it was unlikely this happened on a large, organised scale.
Co-ordinated supplies, like the alleged provision of tons of weapons to the Inkatha Freedom Party in KwaZulu-Natal by convicted killer and former Vlakplaas commander Eugene de Kock, seem to have stopped since 1994.
Yet corrupt security force personnel are always key players in, for example, thefts from police stations or South African National Defence Force bases, because of their inside knowledge on where and how weapons are stored.
In the past three years there have been several court cases in which policemen have been implicated in weapon theft, gun- running and smuggling.
Next month, a police sergeant from Kraaifontein in Cape Town is on trial with Hard Livings gang boss Rashied Staggie, his former second-in-command Roland “Watson” Olince, two of his bodyguards and key West Coast gang leader Charles Benjamien.
The policeman, Ben Collins, is among 11 men charged with the theft of 58 weapons, including R5-rifles and R1-rifles, shotguns and thousands of rounds of ammunition, rubber bullets and stun grenades from the public order policing unit base at Faure outside Cape Town in June last year.
The firearms tracing unit has recovered the majority of weapons at the home of one of the accused and at a church. One pistol was linked to a gang-related killing in Belhar on the Cape Flats days after the theft was discovered.
In 1998 a group of men including security force members were sentenced to long jail terms for supplying, among others, assault weapons to gangs in Eersterus near Pretoria.
Another case has implicated at least two Western Cape policemen in a hand grenade sting gone wrong.
A question mark still remains over the weapons cache found in the car in which former murder and robbery detectives Des Segal and Mike Huysamer were killed near Ceres in 1997.
After the accident illegal weapons like an RPG rocket launcher, assault rifles and ammunition were discovered. Although the Ceres Magistrate’s Court found no one to blame for the deaths, no explanation has been given about the origin or destination of the weapons. The director of public prosecutions has yet to decide whether to prosecute.
Although the law requires the permission of the director of public prosecutions of the province where the undercover operation is taking place, in some instances it appears that agents are not aware of what their informants were doing. And this has led to official embarrassment.
After former Pagad Gauteng co-ordinator and self-confessed National Intelligence Agency (NIA) informer Ayob Mungalee was arrested with four Pagad members in the Klein Karoo in February, he claimed to have transported gunpowder on at least one occasion to Cape Town. His NIA handler denied knowledge of this.
During the parliamentary debate called in the wake of these statements, Minister of Intelligence Joe Nhlanhla insisted co- operation between different intelligence components was good.
But he pointed a finger particularly at corrupt police officers, who leaked details of critical anti-crime operations to gangsters and others.
Last week former policeman George Kieser, who also claims he was an NIA informer, pointed out three arms caches in the West Rand.
Investigators from the Johannesburg-based unit of the investigative directorate on organised crime recovered an M26 hand grenade and its detonator, 96 cap fuses used to detonate explosives like pipe bombs, seven R-1 magazines, 25 super charges and 11 pipe bomb caps.
Mungalee and Kieser claimed the weapons were part of an arms cache headed for Cape Town. Both men allege Western Cape police communications officer Superintendent Riaan Pool “transported explosives and ammunition to the Cape during a time when things were most volatile”.
Pool has denied the allegations and said he had been framed as he was about to testify against Kieser.
The office of the Witwatersrand director of public prosecutions confirmed Pool was trained as an agent in an undercover operation by the police’s national anti- corruption unit.
The Johannesburg organised crime directorate is now investigating the origin and destination of the explosives and ammunition Kieser pointed out. The head of the directorate advocate Gerhard Nel, said results from the forensic tests should be available in the next two weeks.
“We are taking the matter very seriously. The priority is to establish where the explosives come from and where they were headed,” Nel said.
National detective services representative Faizel Kader said: “Concerning unconventional operations, national crime intelligence does not comment.
“Whatever allegations are made would have to be tested in court.”