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| NEWS > 08 July 2007 |
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Police: killers thought Salvad
SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador: Four Guatemalan police officers arrested in the brutal slayings of three Salvadoran legislators told investigators they thought the victims were drug traffickers, police in El Salvador said Friday.
The grisly killings may have been a case of mistaken identity, or a complicated plot, in which someone who wanted to kill the three Central American Parliament members tricked the rogue Guatemalan police officers into thinking the victims were drug dealers.
Salvadoran police, who are cooperating with their Guatemala counterparts in the investigation, ... Read more
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 Article sourced from
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Independent Online - Cape Town
08 July 2007
This article appeared in the above title/site.
To view it in its entirity click this link.
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'I hope you're not going to sh
By: Jeremy Gordin
When I met Robert McBride, the Ekurhuleni police chief on Friday, I said to him: "I hope you're not going to shoot me and rape my photographer, TJ Lemon."
"What?" he exclaimed with an irritated, but mostly bamboozled, expression on his face.
"Don't you read the newspapers?" I asked, referring to a story in a Friday daily which alleged that McBride had threatened to shoot and kill two suspended Metro officers and to rape their wives.
"Well, I mostly don't read the papers," he said. "They're too depressing. Anyway, I'm busy with my job, I'm not concerned about other people's wives."
McBride added that he was not going to "run my life and, more importantly, my war against crime and corruption, by getting paranoid about the nonsense that the media carries. I really can't be bothered. I have work to do".
He said he accepted that he was a "controversial figure and that the media is always writing stuff about me. But I don't care too much.
"If someone can prove something against me, let him do so.
"Such sins as I have committed - believe me, I have paid dearly for them.
"It's interesting that when things the newspapers write about me are wrong, I don't see too many apologies and it's interesting that they always run what other people say about me, but they don't talk to me."
He said that the recent "fuss" in which he was allegedly involved - an apparent punch-up at a petrol station on Wednesday involving Patrick Johnston and Stanley Segathevan, two Metro policemen who were suspended some time ago by McBride, a number of police from Boksburg and some of his "own" officers - was all about nothing.
McBride said that "the only mistake" he had made in recent months was to start investigating corruption in the law enforcement agencies of Ekurhuleni, especially the alleged complicity of certain police in cash-in-transit heists.
All his recent "troubles" stemmed from those investigations.
"But you don't have to take my word for anything," McBride said, asking Director Trish Armstrong, one of his deputies, to join us. He and Armstrong were attending a conference at a hotel near Johannesburg.
Armstrong said that she was present at the incident on Wednesday and that she had felt "totally intimidated and, yes, very frightened" by the behaviour of Johnston and "all the police officers he called from Boksburg, which included his son and also some very senior officers. I actually thought at one point that we were going to get shot by the police.
"We were badly pushed around and bullied and some very nasty things were said about the 'Mickey Mouse' Metro police."
She said Johnston had been stopped by a Metro police officer because his car had tinted windows, which were illegal, and had been handed a "discontinuance" notice that he must get rid of them.
"At that point, just as I was arriving, the (Metro police) officer was not even impounding the car," Armstrong said, "but Johnston summoned half of the South African Police Service to his rescue."
Armstrong said that McBride had not been present for much of what took place but arrived only after he received a "999" call on his car radio - a call to all available officers to come to the scene of an incident.
Johnston and Segathevan, on the other hand, claimed that McBride had threatened them and the SAPS officers who were present. They said they were going to seek a restraining order against him.
They seem to be inferring that McBride is targeting them because they were part of the "clean-up team" that allegedly whisked him away from an accident scene in 2006.
Witnesses to the accident said that McBride, who had rolled his car, was drunk and it has been suggested that he is angry because the men reported him as being drunk.
McBride, however, believes that something else is going on.
"Yes," he said on Friday, "the two of them have threatened to rewrite the statements that they made after the accident.
"They threatened to do so after I suspended them for being involved in matters related to my fight against corruption."
The men's report was sent to the National Prosecuting Authority, which has not decided yet whether to charge McBride with reckless driving.
"They can go ahead and change their statements," he said. "And, if I did something wrong at the accident, and am found guilty, that's fine.
"Let the process begin. I will face my punishment, whatever it is," said McBride, who served seven years in prison after being convicted of the 1986 bombing of Magoo's bar in Durban, which he carried out as an ANC operative.
He was granted amnesty for the attack, in which three people were killed and dozens injured, by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Meanwhile, Prince Hamnca, a spokesperson for the Ekurhuleni Metro, said on Friday that they did not understand the basis for the Democratic Alliance's call for the suspension of McBride.
"We don't understand how they came to that conclusion," said Hamnca. He said any allegations against McBride should be tested first.
"They remain allegations until they are tested. People should respect the process. It is in the hands of the police and we will co-operate with whatever process (there is)."
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