A tip-off that led to the discovery of a stolen vehicle and four automatic rifles with 400 rounds of ammunition has prevented a major robbery at an upmarket Johannesburg shopping mall, Johannesburg police said on Sunday evening.
Spokesperson Superintendent Chris Wilken said the police’s North West intervention unit received a tip-off around 2pm on Sunday about a planned robbery at a shopping mall or a possible cash-in-transit heist.
Police found a silver-blue BMW 5-series parked in Tyrwhitt Street, Rosebank, near the Rosebank mall.
The car was kept under surveilance for the rest of the afternoon and at around 7pm, when most of the shoppers had gone home, the police moved in.
In the car they found three AK-47s, a Vektor R6 and 400 rounds of ammunition for the rifles.
Wilken said the R6 rifle was stolen in August from a security company in the Nelspruit area in Mpumalanga.
The BMW was stolen in Booysens in September.
Wilken said he believed that a major robbery had been prevented.
”The Rosebank mall is very busy on a Sunday,” he said.
”If there was a shooting today, it would have been chaos. We believe this is a major breakthrough.”
Wilken said the rifles would be sent for ballistic testing to establish if they had been used in any recent robberies. – Sapa