Police head of organised crime investigation Maj-Gen Richard Shibiri exchanged money with attempted murder accused Vusimuzi “Cat” Matlala, a secret witness told the Madlanga commission on Wednesday.
The witness, a detective whose identity is being withheld, testified about criminal infiltration within the SAPS leadership. She said phone records of Matlala showed a relationship with Shibiri, and the two had exchanged money.
The detective said she was surprised to find the general’s chats on the accused’s phone during their investigations.
The commission has heard how Matlala, who had a R360m SAPS tender, had close ties to the upper echelons of law enforcement and used such links to protect himself from prosecution.
“I was shocked when we looked at his [Matlala’s] cellphone analysis to find that the general had a talking relationship with Matlala. The relationship was so serious that there was an exchange of monies,” she said.
The findings against Shibiri on the phone records were the same as for former police minister Bheki Cele.
Shibiri in May 2024 invited the detective and her partner, who were investigating the assassination case of engineer Armand Swart in which businessman Katiso Molefe and former detective Michael Pule Tau were arrested for murder, and told them he had heard bribes were offered for them not to oppose bail.
Molefe and Matlala were linked to a “Big Five” cartel allegedly involved in drug trafficking, extortion, cross-border vehicle hijacking, cross-border vehicle theft and tender fraud.
The witness said Shibiri gave Matlala information on how to counter investigations.
She said she was disappointed in the general because “they are supposed to be our heroes, and they are supposed to guide us”.
She further testified that the detectives had found multiple versions of a ballistic report linked to the Swart murder in the computer of the SAPS forensic analyst who had “omitted” crucial information in the report given to the detectives.
She focused her testimony on Wednesday on alleged interference and sabotage from within the SAPS about the Swart assassination.
Swart, an engineer at the company QTech, was shot 23 times in Vereeniging on April 17 2024. His murder was linked to a whistleblower report on a Transnet tender made by his company.
Those arrested for the murder included Tau, who resigned from the police after being granted bail in August last year; Tiego Mabusela; and Musa Kekana.
The detective, identified as witness B, told the commission the police found Tau with 15 empty cartridge cases two hours after Swart’s murder, but the ballistic report from the SAPS Silverton facility made no findings about the cartridge cases linking them to the murder. She also struggled for months to get the police officer who analysed the weapons and cartridges to give her a complete report.
The lack of a full report threatened the state’s case against the suspects, who have since been linked to several other high-profile murder cases.
“It was crucial for us to get confirmation from the ballistic report,” she said.
She said that after the detectives received the “omitted” ballistic report in May, the detectives went to KwaZulu-Natal, where analysts were able to recover serial numbers for the firearms, which had not been done at the police facility in Silverton.
The officer who wrote the ballistic report in Silverton in May told the investigators that the guns were linked to many murders in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng, and that they were investigating “dangerous people” and needed to be careful.
The ballistic report, however, lacked the details linking the guns to other murders.
From May 2024 to January 2025, the witness told the commission, they had struggled to get a full report linking the 15 cartridge cases found in Tau’s car to the murder of Swart.
On January 8, the investigating team obtained the report.
The witness told the commission they had found multiple versions of the ballistic report in the ballistic expert’s computer on the day.
“Multiple versions of the report were found. We took a decision to confiscate his workstation and take it to the cyber [experts] because it was quite concerning,” she said.
She told the commission that the investigators reported the officer.
On the same day, a report of kidnapping at the lab was reported against the officers, but when the police arrived, there was no kidnapping. She said the ballistic expert who had reported the kidnapping had not indicated to the police that he had been the one who had accused the detectives of kidnapping.
“There was nothing we did forcefully,” she said.
She said that when the investigators had reported the ballistic expert, one of his managers had said the expert was “guilty as charged” of omitting crucial information.
The investigation into the ballistic expert officer, however, hit a snag when police investigating the officer struggled to get statements from his superiors.
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