South African
Police Service Police station turned gun-shop
August 20 2009
at 06:13am
Aubrey Tshamana, a clerk at Alexandra police
station, appears in court.
A clerk working inside the Alexandra police
station has been arrested for selling high-calibre R-5 rifles and handguns from
police safes to the criminal underworld.
Detectives from the Joburg Organised Crime
Unit are investigating whether the weapons sold were used by syndicates in the
recent spate of violent robberies at shopping malls.
The administrative clerk from the station's
logistics unit may have sold as many as six R-5 rifles and 16 handguns that
should have been used by officers at his station and the Sandton police
station. Police sources close to the investigation say the guns have not been
recovered and may have been sold for as little as R3 500 for a rifle and R1 000
for a handgun.
A police weapons expert said this was roughly
one-third of their worth.
It's suspected the sales could have been
going on since March.
"We're fighting these guys on the
streets and our own is arming them," one angry police officer from an
affected station said on Thursday.
A lot of questions about how the weapons were
allowed to vanish from the safes, and why it took several months before the
crime was spotted, now need answering.
Aubrey Tshamana was arrested on Monday after
it was discovered that the weapons were missing.
The 26-year-old appeared in the Alexandra
Magistrate's Court (previously Wynberg Magistrate's Court), where State
prosecutor Adele Barnard charged him with theft and possession of unlicensed
firearms.
His case was postponed to the week after next
and he will be kept at high-risk holding cells.
During questioning, he allegedly gave police
several leads that led to two further arrests.
The pair, who are civilians, were likely to
appear in court today. They are suspected of either buying the weapons or
helping to sell them.
When asked why police had brought the docket
to court after 11am, an unidentified police officer from the Organised Crime
Unit - who escorted Tshamana - said the delay was because he was ordered to
report first at the police's provincial head office.
"It's a massive thing," he told the
court.
Magistrate RenierBoshoff then said: "He
can probably tell you who he sold the guns to. He can probably solve a few
cases if you investigate properly."
A police source at the Alexandra police
station said Tshamana worked in the logistics department, which sources and
distributes firearms, vehicles and other equipment. He allegedly managed to
order weapons from the Sandton police station for the purpose of selling them.
"He had access," the source said.
"And that's why he managed to get away with it."
Tshamana is a civilian working at the police
station. He has allegedly been there for more than five years.
Detectives are trying to trace the recipients
of the weapons in an attempt to get them back. If their efforts to link the
weapons to armed robberies at malls pay off, they could be in a position to
charge Tshamana with much more serious crimes.
