Men steal Italian shoes
Six men appeared in the Belfast Magistrate’s Court on Monday for allegedly hijacking a truck full of Italian shoes worth R600 000, Mpumalanga police said.
Captain Leonard Hlathi said Zimbabweans Collins Mawarura, Matheus Matjanku, Gilbert Mungwazi and Marisa Tasunungwura were arrested last week along with South Africans Brandon Slimmerts, 22, and Basheer Raffie, 33, after the truck driver reported it missing.
“A Cape Town businessman reported the truck missing when it failed to reach its destination on June 23. On investigating, police recovered the truck on the N4, headed for Nelspruit,” he said.
When police stopped the truck, the man who was originally tasked with driving it was long gone and the two men found in it said they were hired to drive the truck from Johannesburg to Nelspruit.
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“They claimed a blue BMW with two men who hired them fled when the police approached the truck. We then set up a trap to nab the bosses by getting the driver of the truck to call them, saying police were prepared to release them should they pay a R5 000 bribe,” Hlathi said.
The two alleged masterminds behind the robbery fell for the trap and they were caught minutes after withdrawing money from an ATM at a petrol station in Belfast.
On arresting the men in the BMW, police realised that the truck was never hijacked. Instead, its driver had colluded with the four men to steal the truck and report it as hijacked.
“We again set up a trap and agreed to meet the missing driver and another accomplice at Carnival City Casino in Gauteng. We told him [the driver] that he was going to get his share of the money,” he said.
