Scene of the crime

It looks like Christopher Billings, the alleged criminal mastermind behind a daring 2006 airport heist at OR Tambo Airport that saw a gang strip a London cargo plane of R100 million in foreign currency, is on the run.

New Age Journalist, Dudu Dube, who has been following the case, tweeted the following minutes ago confirming Billings did a runner:

Judge Nico Coetzee began handing down his ruling yesterday, but stopped his ruling this morning because Billings didn’t show up at court.

Billings’ mother stood in the gallery and told the judge that her son was stuck in a roadblock, but he wasn’t taking calls from his lawyer, and the prosecutor asked the media to publicise Billings’ face.

Billings’ face.

Eyewitness News’ Mandy Wiener sent a flurry of tweets a short while ago:

This reads like the plot for an epic South African novel: a daring 1980’s-like heist at OR Tambo led by mastermind, Christopher Billings, and eight other accused accomplices, together with another four, who have since died, colluded with three airport employees in robbing an international flight carrying foreign currency. They stood accused of stripping a London cargo plane of R100 million in foreign currency on 25 March 2006.

The South African Police Service arrested gang members who had escaped through the so-called Thabo Mbeki gate at the airport within days of the robbery, but only some of their loot was recovered.

What appeared to be one of the police’s finest achievements soon turned out to be one of their most embarrassing: about R14 million of the recovered money was stolen from a walk-in safe on the premises of the North Rand serious and violent crime unit in Benoni, and the alleged culprits included three police officers.

It didn’t end there:

Five witnesses were killed shortly after the accused were arrested, and according to a WikiLeaks entry of a cable from the United States’ Pretoria Embassy in 2006, Paul O’Sullivan, the former head of security at Airports Company South Africa, claimed that a criminal syndicate at the airport was responsible.

The ring included police, customs, immigration and security officials, as well as cleaning staff, baggage handlers and airline staff. O’Sullivan believed that the murder of the witnesses was an effort by an organised crime unit to disguise its role in the heist and subsequent theft of the recovered money. He was dismissed by the airports company in 2003 because of “irreconcilable differences”.

Read more about this thriller HERE.

[Sources: ISS, M&G]