The South African Police Service (SAPS), led by national commissioner Jackie Selebi, has been quietly conducting a criminal investigation into National Director of Public Prosecutions Bulelani Ngcuka and other officials in the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA).
At the same time, the man who laid the charges against Ngcuka, former top Scorpions investigator, KwaZulu-Natal magistrate Ashin Singh, this week asked President Thabo Mbeki to intervene to ensure that the probe is properly conducted.
Singh, who has also instituted parallel civil proceedings for damages against the NPA, claims that Ngcuka defeated the ends of justice while the Scorpions were probing a KwaZulu-Natal massacre in 1999 and during the NPA’s unsuccessful attempt to prosecute him.
Singh, who had been a member of a precursor to the Scorpions unit in KwaZulu-Natal in November 1999, was arrested by his own unit and charged with defeating the ends of justice after a fallout between him and the former head of the unit, Chris MacAdam.
The NPA’s case against Singh collapsed last October after the Pietermaritzburg Regional Court found that the investigation was illegal and that Singh’s constitutional rights had been “grossly” violated.
Singh was given back his job as magistrate in the Pietermaritzburg Magistrates Court last November after the court judgement.
Now he says Ngcuka and his officials, including MacAdam, must account for the unlawful prosecution and their “mishandling” of the investigation into the Ndabezithatha family massacre in Richmond in 1999.
Ngcuka delegated MacAdam — now apparently working at the NPA head office — to investigate the massacre. In November that year MacAdam’s unit arrested four soldiers for the crime.
Singh then approached MacAdam and Ngcuka with information that the soldiers had been wrongfully arrested.
Two days later Singh was fired from the unit on the grounds that he had involved himself in a case that was not his. In 2000 the NPA followed up with criminal charges against Singh, including defeating the ends of justice and contravening the Protection of Information Act, after he told the media that the soldiers had been falsely accused of the massacre.
That same year, the soldiers were released after ballistic tests found that they had, indeed, been falsely accused. Five men Singh had identified as being involved in the massacre were later arrested, convicted and given life sentences.
But the NPA’s prosecution of Singh proceeded in the Pietermaritzburg Regional Court until last October, when the court granted a permanent stay of proceedings on the grounds that “the investigations were illegal” and that “they fell outside the scope and ambit” of the Scorpions.
Singh says the judgement would serve to bolster his case against Ngcuka and the NPA.