Johannesburg - Two police officers were held at gunpoint, disarmed and locked up in the back of their marked van in Rabie Ridge, Ekurhuleni, in broad daylight.
It was a lunch break gone wrong. The police officers had parked their van on the side of the road while they ate lunch at a street vendor’s tent when four men pounced just before 3pm on Tuesday.
In a video clip (shown below), two men walk casually down a busy street, one of them with his hand to his ear as if speaking on a cellphone.
A third man in a brown leather jacket walks right behind them, followed by a fourth man in a black drymac and a beanie.
As the first two men are about to pass the van, the man who had been walking behind them crosses over to the side of the van, walking towards the back of a kiosk near the vendor’s tent and next to the van.
The two men in front – one wearing a yellow jacket, another in a white jacket and wearing a white hat – then separate from the man in yellow crossing the road and walking towards the man in the brown jacket.
The man in a white beanie also crosses the road, but moves in front of the van, with the man in the black drymac walking hurriedly towards him. The pair then move around the vendor’s tent. Hidden behind the police van, it is not clear what the four men are up to.
Then, in a matter of minutes, the man in yellow shows up from the left side of the van, pushing one uniformed police officer into the back of the van.
The second officer is also shoved in by the man in the brown jacket.
The man in brown then opens the driver’s side of the van and appears to be searching for some thing.
The man in the white beanie then comes running towards him from the front of the van and, with a firearm in his left hand, he then grabs what appears to be the second firearm from the man in a brown jacket, before dashing off with two other accomplices.
As they hurriedly leave the scene, the man in brown closes the door and, using what appears to be a cloth, wipes the door before following his three accomplices.
The clip, which was recorded on the CCTV camera of a nearby business at 2.51pm, then shows the men disappearing around the corner, allowing bystanders to let the officers out of the van.
Once freed, the two policemen called for backup and chased after the men, who had by then been joined by three others in a hijacked vehicle, Gauteng police spokesman Brigadier Neville Malila said.
“A chase ensued. The suspects lost control of their vehicle and fired several shots at the police, who returned fire,” he said.
Three of the men were arrested and three firearms, including the two taken earlier from the officers, were recovered.
The third firearm, Malila said, was linked to an incident in September where a Joburg metro police officer was shot and killed, and robbed of his service pistol. Police were searching for more suspects.
The Star