[imagesource: Twitter/ SAPS]

It seems like there’s an assassination or ‘hit’ story just about every week these days, and those who pull the strings behind the scenes don’t want anything that can be traced back to them.

In order to get away with their misdeeds, it helps to have a few cops on the payroll, especially when it comes to procuring the guns used to carry out the crimes.

According to a new investigation by The Daily Maverick’s Caryn Dolley, illicit firearms are widely available to gangsters in the Western Cape, and in many cases, it’s the police themselves who are selling the weapons:

In three sets of arrests over the [past] seven years several South African Police Service (SAPS) members have also been detained, hinting at just how rife state complicity in this arena is – and why certain cop investigations seem to have faced internal resistance.

In one of the latest gun-smuggling arrests, the Hawks detained a firearms dealer from Durban, Anderson Padayachee, on 11 February. According to a Hawks statement, he was allegedly “linked to an illegal supply of firearms through his dealership to criminal gangs in the Western Cape”.

Police involvement in the selling and distribution of illegal firearms is nothing new, and efforts to crack down over the past seven years have been met by some resistance from within law enforcement ranks.

One of the most prominent investigations, codenamed Project Impi, revealed that illegally obtained firearms were used in as many as 1 666 gang hotspot murders between 2010 and 2016 alone.

Top cops involved in Project Impi said the investigation was dismantled “on the orders of SAPS management”.

The Western Cape remains the epicentre of the problem, which was aided and abetted by those at the very top.

A few weeks back, an unidentified witness testified at the State Capture Commission:

This witness spoke about firearms that went missing from the State Security Agency while Jacob Zuma was president.

She said: “The conditions under which the armoury people had to work are very concerning … one of them actually told me and the team that each time there is a media report on … an assassination … they always get nervous because they are thinking, ‘We hope it is not one of our firearms’.”

That’s the same State Security Agency that is alleged to have funnelled between R2,5 million and R4,5 million a month directly to Zuma, over the course of three years.

You can read Dolley’s full article here.

[source:dailymaverick]