Cape Town - Police have called on the public to help them find suspects linked to recent armed robberies at shopping malls in Somerset West and Brackenfell.
There has been a spate of shopping mall robberies in and around Cape Town over recent months. The robbers escape by surreptitiously blending in with shoppers.
A robbery on Sunday turned deadly, when gunmen, one apparently posing as a woman, shot dead a security guard in the 15th mall attack in the Western Cape in the past four weeks.
The gunmen struck while the guards were collecting money at the Pick n Pay store in Waterstone Village, Somerset West, on Sunday morning.
On Monday, robbers targeted a mall in Paarl, robbing three stores.
The police’s Western Cape liaison office issued pictures of four men, two extracted from surveillance cameras at a mall at Somerset West and two from cameras at the mall in Brackenfell and asked people who recognised them to come forward.
On September 21, a jewellery store was robbed in Somerset West and two suspects captured on surveillance footage. The identities of the suspects depicted on the attached images are yet to be determined, said police spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Andre Traut.
Earlier this year, on May 15, three men held up and robbed staff at a cellular telephone shop in Brackenfell.
“Two of the suspects have been identified and their photographs are hereby issued for publication as they are wanted on a charge of armed robbery,” Traut said.
“The two were released on bail after their arrest for an armed robbery perpetrated at a cellular telephone shop in Woodstock in March this year, and they failed to return to court. They are Zandisile Nelani and Siyabonga Gwangqa.
Anyone with information, or who can assist the police with the whereabouts or identification of these suspects, is kindly requested to contact Captain Charl Kinnear on 082 820 8015. All information will be treated confidentially.
The police had been meeting with mall and shopping centre owners in the province, Traut said.
“It became evident that there is a lot that needs to be done to improve inner perimeter security.
“We are helping the malls with regard to deployments and other issues such as positioning of CCTV cameras, based on our crime-pattern analysis, to enhance security measures.
“Additional deployments and intelligence-driven operations are also key in our approach to curb the tendency in the Western Cape,” he said.
Cape Argus