Six held, 560kg of Transnet copper seized in Free State as cable thieves leave townships in the dark

Six men aged between 26 and 48 were arrested in the Free State on Monday night after police and a private crime-fighting network stopped two vehicles carrying 560.85kg of suspected stolen Transnet copper cable valued at about R100,000.

For the households and businesses that lose power when the cable disappears, the interception is the rare part of the story that ends well. Copper theft across the country has left clinics without refrigeration, left commuters on dark platforms and left informal traders counting the hours of lost income, and the recovery of more than half a tonne in a single stop is the kind of result residents in mining and farming towns have been demanding from the police for years.

As IOL reported on 14 October, the arrests followed a tip-off received at about 9pm on Monday that two vehicles travelling from Bothaville to Welkom were carrying stolen cable. Police working with the Eyes & Ears public-private initiative stopped the vehicles and found the cable. The men face charges related to the possession of suspected stolen property and were expected to appear in the Odendaalrus Magistrate’s Court.

Preliminary investigations indicate the cable belongs to Transnet in the North West province, which means the load left a state-owned rail or port asset before it reached the Free State road where it was found. Transnet has been a repeated target of cable syndicates because its network carries signalling and telecommunications lines that are hard to replace quickly and expensive to repair.

The arrests fell under Operation Shanela, the SAPS crime prevention programme launched in 2023 under then police minister Bheki Cele and relaunched at the start of the 2025/2026 financial year as Operation Shanela II. The operation places officers in identified crime hotspots and has produced arrests across the country in recent years. Its record on cable theft specifically is what communities measure it by, because the crime is not abstract. When copper goes, the service goes with it.

What residents in Allanridge and the surrounding Free State towns know is that a single recovery does not end a syndicate. The trade runs on scrap dealers who buy without asking, on buyers who move the metal across provincial lines, and on the fact that the cable is worth more as scrap than the risk of being caught has been worth to the people carrying it. The stop between Bothaville and Welkom is the point where that calculation is supposed to change.

The private-public model used here, with Eyes & Ears feeding information to police, is the same approach that has produced results on hijacking and house robbery in other provinces. It relies on ordinary people reporting what they see. In this case it worked. In many other cases the cable is gone before anyone calls.

The men are presumed innocent until the court decides otherwise. Their appearance in Odendaalrus Magistrate’s Court is the next dated step in the case, and the charge sheet will show what the state believes it can prove about where the cable came from and where it was going.

The Enquirer will follow the prosecution and the wider question of what happens to the scrap market that keeps cable theft profitable. For now, more than half a tonne of Transnet copper is off the road, and the townships and rail users who would have paid for it in darkness have not had to.