Pretoria - Convicted killer Waylan Abdullah lost his appeal against his murder conviction following the death of Gregory Carelse, who worked as a police reservist and security officer in the Community Safety Department of the City of Cape Town at the time.
Carelse was known for his work in fighting gangsterism on the Cape Flats. He was shot multiple times on October 18, 2018, by Abdullah and Ashwin Willemse, also known as “Krag”.
Abdullah, nicknamed Wena – received an effective 29-year jail sentence in 2020.
He then took the matter to the Supreme Court of Appeal to appeal against his conviction.
According to him, his right to a fair trial had been trampled on as the high court in Cape Town at the time refused to recall the State’s only witness, so that he could again be cross-examined by the defence.
Dale Carelse was the only witness to his father’s killing. He testified that after he heard gunshots, he ran to the scene and saw Abdullah standing over his dead father. He said he knew both killers well, and that they were well-known gangsters.
Abdullah, however, disputed that Carelse, in the chaos that prevailed, could have had a good look at him, and that his identification of him was in fact incorrect.
Judge Gayaat Salie-Hlope at the time said there was no need to recall Carelse, and turned down Abdullah’s application to recall the witness.
On the day of the incident, both Prezano Holland and Gregory Carelse were shot and killed in Bishop Lavis, Cape Town, by two gunmen acting with a common purpose. Holland was killed by a single gunshot wound, whereas Carelse’s body was riddled with multiple gunshot wounds. According to the pathologist, 10 shots were fired into Carelse’s body, six of which were to the head.
One of the firearms used was linked to many other murder cases. Because there were no witnesses to Holland’s murder, both accused were acquitted.
Judge Caroline Nicholls, who wrote the Supreme Court judgment, briefly sketched the milieu in which the murders took place.
She noted that gang violence had long been rife in areas on the outskirts of Cape Town, commonly known as the Cape Flats.
Gangs have their roots in the apartheid forced removals where communities were moved from their old neighbourhoods, in or near the city centre, to the wastelands that make up the Cape Flats.
“Gang violence continues today, unabated, making everyday life a hazardous business for the residents of those areas. Shootings and bullet-ridden bodies have become a daily occurrence in gang-ravaged areas.”
In 2018 the Western Cape Department of Community Safety acknowledged that there was the added challenge of drug abuse, as well as police officials who were being controlled by gangs and corrupt politicians who had control of the drug trade in specific areas.
The deceased was a witness and prospective State witness in a gang-related drive-by shooting that took place in 2017 in which three people were murdered.
The accused in that case were members of the notorious prison gang, the 28s. Its members, when outside prison, were mostly affiliated to a gang known as “The Firm”.
The investigating officer in the triple murder case testified that there were leadership disputes among the 28s that played out among members of The Firm. Carelse sr, before his death, agreed to be a State witness in that case.
Another State witness in the triple murder case had been murdered a few months before Carelse.
Carelse jr, meanwhile, reported his father’s murder to Colonel Charl Kinnear, who was a good friend of his father.
Judge Nicholls commented in her judgment that “it is not insignificant that in September 2020 Kinnear was murdered in a hail of bullets outside his house in Bishop Lavis while investigating numerous cases of organised crime involving gangsters and high-level police officers”.
In turning down Abdullah’s appeal, she said Carelse jr knew him, and although he may have only seen him fleetingly standing over the bullet-ridden body of his father, he no doubt correctly identified him as one of the murderers.
Pretoria News