Abdus-Salaam Ebrahim, the former national coordinator of the organisation People Against Gangsterism and Drugs (Pagad), was on Friday jailed for four years for his part in an attack eight years ago on the Mitchells Plain home of alleged gangster and drug dealer Mogamat Madatt.
His four-year-long trial in the Paarl Regional Court, with co-accused Ismail Sieed, Ebrahiem Davids and Rashaad Salie, ended with magistrate Johnny Vermeulen sentencing the three co-accused to two years’ house arrest.
They were sentenced on charges of public violence.
Because Ebrahim would otherwise have been released from prison on Friday, after serving an eight-year sentence for the murder in August 1996 of Hard Livings gang leader Rashied Staggie, Vermeulen told him: ”I have tried to be fair.”
Vermeulen added: ”I know your new jail sentence sounds cruel, and dashes any hopes you had of leaving prison today [Friday], but the court sometimes has to be cruel to be kind.”
Vermeulen said he had seriously considered giving Ebrahim the same sentence as the other three, but Ebrahim had been in a leadership role with Pagad, which made his situation worse than the others.
Vermeulen said: ”Less than two years after the brutal Staggie murder, you involved yourself in the attack on the Madatt home — that’s an aggravating factor.
”A sentence of house arrest for you would have sent out the wrong message to the community, and it would have amounted to a failure of duty on my part to do so.”
Vermeulen said Ebrahim was highly intelligent, with strong leadership qualities, and still had an important role to fulfil in the fight against crime.
He told the four: ”I do regard your frustrations with gangsterism and drug abuse, and the inability of the police to act against it, as strong mitigation.
”I have had personal experience of crime a couple of times in the last few years.
”When you ask what the authorities intend doing about the crisis, and politicians tell you to pack your bags and leave the county, then I understand the frustrations of the community.”
Vermeulen said he did not like people like Madatt, a self-confessed criminal.
He added: ”The harm he does to children and the communities with his drug trafficking, has to be dealt with.
”Unfortunately, the way you dealt with it was incorrect — you fought crime with crime, which only aggravated the crisis.”
Vermeulen said the case had taken four years, and he would have preferred to have directed his efforts against Madatt, rather than Ebrahim and his co-accused.
He added: ”That is the nonsensical consequence of what you did. I fully understand the frustrations of the community, but you have no right to take the law into your own hands.” — Sapa