Organised crime and robberies

Makhotla Sefuli

Gift Rampai
Matjhabeng local Municipality
Welkom Free State Province
15th August 2022

#organisedcrime&robberies

On the 31st of July 2022,two filling stations were robbed on the same night . These two incidents took place within a first hours of each other .
The similarities, the execution style and modus operandi and coordination indicates that they were carried out by the same perpetrators .It is alleged that a four man team heavily armed with assault rifles carried out these robberies, another allegation is that the same gang used explosives to bomb an ATM

The execution style of the two incidents, despite their proximity is indicative of an organized crime syndicate. One incident took place in Thabong while the one took place happened in Riebeeckstad.

Puma garage was the first to be hit by the robberies, this garage is situated in Thabong and in a very busy shopping center and a police station across the street. The irony is that the street is also the main one and the busiest through out the night.

The second target was shell garage in Riebeeckstad and also situated in the busy street called Craib avenue within walking distance of a police station. This is an affluent suburban area with a high population of middle class and the streets are always under twenty four hours patrol by private security companies.

So far there has been no arrests and the police haven’t released a statement about how they’re going to deal with this type of crimes The criminals fled both scenes huge undisclosed amounts of cash without any casualties

Our crime intelligence seems to very ineffective and lacking capacity to detect this kind of crimes and they pose a very serious about threat to our security and those who work night shifts at filling stations are at risk of being killed.