Johannesburg - Like the other visitors to Bedford Centre, they took a ticket as they entered the undercover parking at the mall.
But they weren’t there to shop on Wednesday morning. The men who arrived in the white Toyota Hilux later fled the mall, firing shots in the air that caused shoppers to scatter and dive for cover.
They left after robbing cash-in-transit guards of cash and firearms.
To get out the centre, they presumably paid their parking ticket so as to leave through the boom, which is also protected by retractable metal spikes.
Witnesses outside the centre said four men arrived about an hour before the robbery and had sat at a table. They then entered the mall just after 11am.
According to police spokeswoman Lieutenant-Colonel Katlego Mogale, the robbers held up the three security guards on the first floor of the centre as they stepped out of the lift. “They took their guns, including assault rifles,” said Mogale.
The men also took a bag of cash, with an undisclosed amount of money. As they left the centre, one of the men armed with an assault rifle began firing into the air.
One bullet left a hole in the window of the post office, another in the roof.
Claude Bakel, who was at Absa on the first floor of the centre when the heist happened, said he heard only one gunshot come from the floor below before the bank went into lockdown.
“I panicked,” Bakel said. “But I felt safe inside the bank because they automatically locked the doors.”
Another witness said there were about seven or eight robbers who jumped on to the back of the bakkie as it sped out the parkade.
“It was like an army, one of the guys on the back fired four or five shots in the air, as the bakkie left the parking,” said the witness, who didn’t want to give his name.
The bakkie, according to the witness, turned left into Smith Road.
About a kilometre away, on Leicester Street in Kensington, police conducting investigations found a cash trolley, an empty money bag and a security guard’s black gun holster.
A witness said he had watched a white car pull up in Kensington and later drive off.
Shortly after the robbery, a patrolling metro police officer arrested a 40-year-old man after he stopped a white bakkie.
“The suspect was speeding and driving erratically, so the officer pulled him over,” said Mogale.
“The man tried to flee, but was apprehended. Police found a 9mm firearm in the vehicle and took the bakkie to Cleveland police station.”
The assistant manager of Bedford Centre, Helen Lafas, said there hadn’t been a robbery at the mall in a long time. She said they had handed over CCTV footage to the police.
The Star