POLOKO TAU
T EN men, armed to the teeth, entered a Total garage shop and held up staff. Within a matter of minutes they had placed explosives on the ATM inside the convenience store.
Then the explosives went off. As the robbers were helping themselves to the cash, a police van doing routine patrol went to investigate the explosion. Other men standing guard outside the shop started shooting at the police van. A policewoman lay dead in the car. The men speed off with an undisclosed amount of money. They were still at large by late last night.
This happened at about 10.30pm at the garage in Pimville Zone 7 on Tuesday. It was the second time in four years that the garage had been hit by ATM bombers. The last time, the garage was badly damaged and it took more than a year for renovations to be done.
Reservist constable Busisiwe Mehlwana, 33, of Pimville Zone 5, died a few kilometres from her home – just before Minister of Police Nathi Mthethwa hosts a summit against police killings in Boksburg tomorrow.
Her family were yesterday too distraught to speak.
When The Star arrived at the garage yesterday, owner Peter Ntsoko and his staff were cleaning up the convenience store. He said although the garage was not flattened in Tuesday’s bombing, it was “unfortunate that a life has been lost. Police officers often come here for coffee at night and the response on Tuesday was very quick. What has happened is very sad indeed,” Ntsoko said, adding that the gang were heavily armed “like they were going to attack Gaddafi”.
“Some had their faces covered. They ordered staff and customers to the floor before proceeding to attach explosives and bombing the ATM,” he said.
Ntsoko said his garage was first hit in November 2006 in what he described as a much more serious explosion that badly affected his business.
“The explosion was so severe that it didn’t only almost bring the whole place down, but the neighbouring properties were affected as well. We had to revamp the whole place,” he said. “The ATM then was outside and the staff saw smoke coming out of it that night, and found explosives attached to it when they went to investigate. They fled, and soon it exploded.”
Ntsoko said he was out of business for more than a year busy renovating the filling station, and opened only in July 2008.
A colleague of Mehlwana at the Kliptown police station described her as someone who was passionate about her work.
“So passionate was she that she was killed at the time when she was supposed to be on compassionate leave, but chose to get back to work earlier before her leave ended. She had been a reservist for a while in Secunda, Mpumalanga, and only joined us at Kliptown around July last year,” he said.
“Things were finally falling in place for her, in that she was due to go to police training college in January. She was finally going to be a permanent employee of the police service, and then this sad thing happened.”
Police spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel Lungelo Dlamini said yesterday that Mehlwana was shot on the side of the upper body while inside the vehicle and died at the scene.
The driver of the patrol van was injured when he fell on one of his knees after jumping out of the vehicle.
Dlamini said the suspects, who were armed with high-calibre firearms, fled the scene in a white Isuzu bakkie with “a substantial amount of money”.
Meanwhile, Mthethwa said in a statement announcing tomorrow’s summit:
“There is a war out there, which, by the way, has been declared by criminals on society and police – and the society in this instance is on the side of the police.
“We are, therefore, calling upon all these different sectors, particularly, to draw from their scientific, qualitative, personal and academic expertise on how we can all tackle this challenge of killing of our members,” he said.