Employees of a pine furniture shop in Woodmead were beaten and held at gunpoint in the third reported armed robbery of a business in Johannesburg on Monday morning.
The robbers entered Lotters Pine Furniture in the popular shopping complex that houses HiFi Corporation and a range of home and decor shops shortly before 10am, with one posing as a customer and asking questions about items in the shop.
Salesperson Pieter Vorster said: ”I was helping a client when they came in. One of them I saw as a client and started helping him.”
The man asked Vorster about items on display and then asked about one that was at the rear of the shop. Suddenly, two other people produced weapons.
”They pulled out AK-47s and gunpointed us,” Vorster said quietly. ”He threw me down to the ground and beat us up.”
The robbers grabbed all the cash in the shop and ran away.
”Nobody got shot,” said Vorster who, with his six colleagues, was later assessed by paramedics.
”We are just going to carry on, it’s business,” he said.
Johannesburg police were unable to comment immediately on the Woodmead robbery.
Earlier at Pick ‘n Pay in Mulbarton, south of the city, seven to 10 robbers held up security staff and management at the supermarket.
The robbers struck at the Klip River Drive supermarket shortly before 9am.
They took money and the security guard’s firearm and fled in four vehicles, leaving those at the scene of the crime unharmed.
The police reacted immediately, and in the chase two robbers were wounded in the legs and four were arrested near the corner of Klip River and Colombine drives.
Police recovered a maroon Toyota Tazz and a white VW Jetta belonging to relatives of those suspected of the crime.
They also confiscated a 9mm Beretta pistol, a .375 Astra revolver, a shotgun and two 9mm Norinco pistols, one of which belonged to the security guard.
In Soweto, cash-in-transit robbers shot a Fidelity security guard in the head in Dube before fleeing with a cash box.
The guards were about to deliver money to Capitec Bank when they were attacked, said Captain Mbazima Shiburi.
The guard died instantly.
On Sunday, about 12 robbers stole an undisclosed amount of cash from the Emperor’s Palace casino near the Johannesburg International airport, and on Friday, a security guard was killed and two injured during a robbery at the Rosebank Mall. — Sapa