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 Renier
Boshoff 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.
