Marianne Merten
The alleged bogeyman behind Cape drive-by shootings – Ebrahim Jenneker of People against Gangsterism and Drugs (Pagad) – will stand trial on 124 charges ranging from murder to malicious damage to property in the Cape High Court from Monday.
For more than six months he has been moved between different Cape jails following his arrest for killing gangster Adielah “Mama America” Davids, her daughter and her niece in Davids’s Grassy Park hair salon in April last year.
Since then investigators have linked Jenneker to the Easter 1999 murder of Mitchells Plain gang boss Glen Khan and a bodyguard.
Other charges relate to last year’s attacks on a former Pagad investigator, Senior Superintendent Schalk Visagie, and Sergeant Barry Chamberlain.
Police insist Jenneker is the key to solving the Cape Flats war that spilled over into some of the Cape’s top tourism spots last year.
Ironically, in mid-September 1998 he was released from Brandvlei prison in terms of a presidential amnesty.
It took some time before Jenneker, who has been selling flowers across Cape Town since his teenage years, caught the eye of the police.
He was first identified at the funeral of wheelchair-bound Hard Livings gangster Moeneeb “Bowtie” Abrahams, who was gunned down at the end of January 1998.
A group of gangsters thought Jenneker looked suspicious and confronted him about hiding a firearm under a newspaper folded over his arm.
Police intervened and then found a small arms cache on the back seat of a car later traced to one of Jenneker’s relatives.
Jenneker was never charged in connection with the arsenal and, months later, walked free on charges of murdering Abrahams.
Instead, he was shot repeatedly on the steps of the Cape Town Magistrate’s Court minutes after several top Cape gang bosses were seen in the area.
Countless police raids on Jenneker’s home produced little evidence of any links to crime. Yet Jenneker remained the perennial suspect.
In one police raid in late 1998 detectives seized the blood-stained bulletproof vest and jacket of Mitchells Plain “Americans” gang boss Kadika Madat.
He again walked free after the court accepted his testimony that another man, who was found shot dead in an Athlone squatter camp, wanted him to sell it.
Late last year Jenneker was again acquitted on charges of murdering a key state witness from Beacon Valley in Mitchells Plain in another trial against him.