The dockets removed from the KwaZulu-Natal political task team after their disbandment by police minister Senzo Mchunu had major shortcomings, including warrants of arrest that were not carried out for months.
This was the testimony of the police national serious & violent crime investigation head, Maj-Gen Mary Motsepe, before the Madlanga commission on Monday.
Motsepe said 121 dockets taken from the KZN political task team after Mchunu disbanded them had shortcomings, and some held warrants of arrest for suspects who were not nabbed by the team for months, the commission was told.
Motsepe told the commission the 121 dockets were taken to her office after deputy national commissioner Shadrack Sibiya issued a directive for the disbanding of the team and withdrawal of the dockets.
KwaZulu-Natal provincial commissioner Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi painted a bleak picture of “delayed justice” caused by the withdrawal of the dockets.
Motsepe said her office conducted an audit of them and found shortcomings in some of the teams’ investigations.
In one case, from Ndwedwe in KZN, two warrants of arrest had been issued on October 1 2024 but no arrests had been made before the team was disbanded on December 31 2024.
Missing statements
She said some dockets had several statements missing in the evidence annexures, including the murder file on Eastern Cape woman Namhla Mtwa, which was transferred to the team after a national uproar due to delays in the probe.
Three suspects linked to Mtwa’s April 2022 murder were also killed.
Motsepe confirmed that from March until August, no investigations were done on the dockets transferred to Pretoria. She said national police commissioner Fannie Masemola rejected her request for funding to investigate the task team’s cases.
The commander of the task team, Lt-Col Ntate Khumalo, told the commission all the evidence from the dockets was accounted for but had appeared to be missing because the handover was messy and some documents were incorrectly indexed in the files.
“The handover, I must say, was messy,” he said.
Khumalo said he received a call from the task team leader, police crime intelligence head Lt-Gen Dumisani Khumalo, on March 25 and was told to hand over the dockets the next day.
In all, 118 dockets in KZN were handed over, and three dockets in the Eastern Cape were submitted in April.
After Motsepe flagged missing statements in her report [information that was leaked to the media], Ntate Khumalo said he had followed up with his team and all statements had been accounted for.
“I can confirm all those statements are accounted for and are intact,” he said.
He said in Mtwa’s case, two files had been kept for the statements, and some of them had been left in a police safe when the docket was transferred to Pretoria.
Khumalo also addressed the issue of two warrants relating to Ndwedwe, in which suspects were not arrested by the team. He said the team had been unable to arrest the suspects because they had been on the run.
“We had numerous operations in locating these suspects. We found out [during tracing operations] that one was shot and killed and one was still on the run.”
He said murder suspects, when they caught wind a warrant had been issued, “run for their lives”.
“There are a lot of suspects that we are still looking for.”
He told the commission that many of the suspects changed provinces and changed their appearance to avoid arrest. Tracking them down required resources.
Khumalo said the disbandment directive dealt a blow to the team, whose members were cut from 98 to 56.
The team had lost key ballistic and crime scene experts.
“We had three ballistic experts, but now we do not have any. That letter [Mchunu’s] tore them apart.”
He said the loss of experts in the team would negatively affect the turnaround of the investigations because the team was not fully capacitated.
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