A bomb blast damaged the offices of the police’s serious and violent crimes unit in Cape Town on Saturday night, but no deaths or injuries were caused.
Western Cape police representative Captain Neville Malila said the front door and windows of the serious and violet crimes unit — housed in a building some 50-80m away from the Bishop Lavis police station on the Cape Flats — had been blown out. Earlier reports
that the Bishop Lavis police station itself had been bombed were incorrect.
Malila said on Sunday evening that all the forensic evidence that could be collected had been collected, and had been sent to a police laboratory for testing.
Malila would not be drawn on the nature of the bomb, saying only that it was ”an explosive device”. He would not speculate on who might be responsible for the blast.
Western Cape safety and security MEC Leonard Ramatlakane condemned the blast. Asked if there was a connection between this blast and a series of bomb explosions in Gauteng last month, the MEC said he would not speculate.
On October 30, two people were injured when a bomb’s detonator exploded at a temple in Bronkhorstpruit, east of Pretoria, and a woman was killed and her husband injured by falling shrapnel from one of nine blasts in Soweto, south of Johannesburg.
There has been a spate of bomb hoaxes across the country over the past weeks, but police do not believe there is a link between the hoaxes and the Gauteng blasts.
Although police have not made any arrests in connection with the Gauteng blasts, the shadowy rightwing group, the Boeremag (Boer force), has been linked to the explosions.
National Police Commissioner Jackie Selebi told the National Assembly’s safety and security committee earlier this week that police were certain that members of the Boeremag organisation were behind the Gauteng blasts.
Several members of the organisation known as People Against Gangsterism and Drugs (Pagad) have been charged with, and some have been found guilty of, planting bombs in the Western Cape. The last such explosions was in 2000.
The Pagad-linked devices were typically home-made pipe-bombs while rightwing groups prefer commercial explosives and improvised bombs containing fertiliser. – Sapa