A Joburg resident has allegedly been killed by the Hawks in their hunt for most-wanted criminal Bongani Moyo.
Mthungameli Mpofu died after a group of plainclothes officers stormed his Berea apartment early on Wednesday.
Their intention? To question him about Moyo, who was arrested in May in connection with more than 30 bank robberies – but who walked right out of a Pretoria courtroom this month. It was his second escape this year.
Police said Mpofu was seen with Moyo last week. They said he was also wanted for bank robbery in Zimbabwe. They said he resisted arrest, and collapsed and died after a scuffle.
The Independent Complaints Directorate are investigating, and were due to attend Mpofu’s autopsy today.
On Wednesday afternoon, Mpofu’s wife Thokozile Ndlovu was trying to make sense of her husband’s death.
She, her two flatmates and the building’s security guards were detained during Mpofu’s interrogation. This is their version of the events:
It was just before midnight when the two security guards of Preston Place in Berea heard knocking. With the tint on the door, they didn’t know the men outside were police, but they let them in.
“Where are the elevators?” the officers asked.
They then confiscated the guards’ phones.
“Don’t move,” they said. “Stay where you are.” A plain-clothes officer kept watch over them.
On the 13th floor, flatmates Lister Nkomo and Isaltina Dube woke up to guns and angry voices.
“Get up,” the men said.
In the next room, Ndlovu and her husband could hear the plainclothes officers before they saw them.
“Get dressed,” they told Ndlovu. She and her six-year-old son were sent to the sitting room with Nkomo and Dube. Their phones were also confiscated.
From the sitting room, they could hear Mpofu’s interrogation.
“Where is your friend?”
“I don’t know.”
“You know Bongani.”
“I don’t know him.”
“Where’s your car?”
“I don’t have a car.”
Then, a scream and a loud thud against the wall.
Everything went quiet. The minutes passed.
An officer came out of the bedroom. He wanted a key to lock the door. Ndlovu didn’t have one.
“You could see it,” said Nkomo. “You could see it on their faces that something was wrong.”
The officers began leaving, one by one.
“Don’t move,” they told the waiting women. “We’ll be back.”
But after five minutes alone in the flat, they couldn’t wait anymore and went into the bedroom.
There were clothes everywhere, the room turned upside down. In the middle of the floor lay Mpofu. Bubbles in his mouth, blood around his nose, his eyes closed.
As the women went to fetch security – still being guarded downstairs – the officers returned, this time with uniformed Hillbrow police, paramedics and ICD investigators.
Mpofu was dead, they said.
He is the second person to die in the hunt for Moyo. - The Star