Three Nyanga gun suspects walk free on R5 000 bail as Cape Town counts its dead
The Athlone Magistrate's Court released the men arrested with AK-47s and fake plates, and the City's safety chief says the criminal justice system is losing a war it cannot win without it.
Three men arrested in Nyanga in possession of AK-47 rifles, other firearms and more than 350 rounds of ammunition have each been released on R5 000 bail by the Athlone Magistrate’s Court.
As CapeTown ETC reported on 30 September, the men appeared in court on Tuesday, where the case was postponed to January. The State opposed bail. The court granted it anyway.
The arrests were not routine. The men were also found with fake number plates, according to the account of the arrest. That combination, high-powered rifles and falsified plates, is the signature of a vehicle prepared for a shooting rather than a vehicle used for transport.
JP Smith, the City of Cape Town’s Mayoral Committee member for Safety and Security, said the outcome undoes work that LEAP officers had done on a public tip-off. “Today, our teams were informed that the suspects were each released on R5 000 bail and the case postponed to January next year despite the opposition from the State,” he said.
Smith linked the ruling to a broader problem the City has been raising for months: the volume of illegal firearms moving through Cape Town’s poorer areas, and the growing presence of military-pattern rifles among them. “The endless supply of illegal weapons on our streets is of great concern, and more so the appearance of high-powered rifles,” he said.
He pointed to a weekend in which more than 30 people were killed in mass shootings that are believed to have involved illegal firearms, and to the killings in Lwandle. “Had it not been for proactive policing by the LEAP officers, these weapons could have cost many lives,” he said.
Smith also called on the South African Police Service to establish how weapons of that class reach the street in the first place, and said the criminal justice system’s handling of cases like this one is the constraint on everything the City does upstream. “We will never win this war if the criminal justice system continues to allow criminals to walk free on our streets,” he said.
For a reader outside the Cape, the institutional detail matters. LEAP is the Law Enforcement Advancement Plan, a City of Cape Town programme staffed by officers deployed in high-crime areas, funded and run by the metro rather than by SAPS. Its officers make arrests. They do not prosecute, and they do not decide bail. Earlier this year LEAP officers acting on a tip-off from the public uncovered an arms cache in Crossroads, in an operation the City has cited as evidence that tip-offs work when they are acted on quickly.
Bail decisions sit with the courts, and a magistrate weighs the strength of the State’s case, the accused’s ties to the area, the risk of flight and the risk to the public. The State opposed bail in this matter. The court’s reasons for granting it have not been set out in the material available.
What ordinary residents will notice is the arithmetic of the next five months. The men are out, the case returns in January, and the firearms that were seized are no longer on the street while the case runs. Whether the case survives that period, and whether the State’s opposition at the bail hearing is followed by a prosecution that holds, is the part that will be measured in Athlone and in Nyanga rather than in press statements.
Source: CapeTown ETC, City of Cape Town outraged as court grants bail to men with AK-47s
