Johannesburg - The robbing of a truck carrying cigarettes created a chain of events that saw a shootout between police and robbers who abandoned their car to hijack another one and then crashed it as they drove off.
Apparently the men had not banked on the police chasing them and shooting at them from a helicopter and from the ground. By the time it was all over, the quiet streets of Buccleuch, Sandton, were swarming with police, two men had been arrested and the woman who had been hijacked was left traumatised.
The incident started around 9am in Kempton Park on Thursday. At the Glen Marais Mall, armed men allegedly forced the driver of a British American Tobacco (BAT) truck to drive the vehicle up Hardekool Street. Gauteng police spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel Lungelo Dlamini said once there, the men loaded boxes of cigarettes into a Quantum minibus that was parked nearby.
Both vehicles drove away and police were later alerted and given a description of the robbers’ vehicles, one of which was a Golf GTI. Officers spotted the Golf in Rabie Ridge and started chasing it. When they reached Old Pretoria Road in Buccleuch, the robbers were involved in a shootout with a member of the Gauteng Flying Squad.
“As the shooting continued, the suspects abandoned the Golf and tried to hijack another vehicle. In the process, a police chopper had already joined the chase and the suspects abandoned the hijacked vehicle and ran away,” Dlamini said.
Cheyenne Davis, a paramedic from Emerg-Med who was at the scene, said that during the car chase, police managed to box in the suspects with their vehicles.
The robbers then abandoned the car and fled on foot. While fleeing, they came across a woman driving a black Jeep.
“They pulled her out of the car and got inside. However, they crashed into a steel barrier under a bridge. They got out of the car and ran away again, but police arrested two of them,” said Davis.
The woman, she said, was unharmed but traumatised.
Dlamini said no one was injured, and other suspects in a Quantum were still at large.
While he said R30 000 worth of cigarettes had been stolen, BAT did not want to disclose information relating to the incident as well as stock lost, saying the matter was currently under investigation.
In March this year, a suspected robber was shot dead and his alleged accomplice wounded by a security guard when they attempted to rob another BAT delivery truck parked outside a shop in Athlone, Cape Town.
In another matter, a police officer shot a man who was part of a group that was allegedly trying to rob a tuckshop in Tembisa, Ekurhuleni.
The officer, who was off duty at the time, saw a group of men busy breaking the window of the tuckshop and fired shots at them.
“When they ran from the scene, he noticed that they had carried one of them, and he summoned help. Police came and looked for the man. They found him hiding in the veld with a bullet wound in his leg,” he said.
Dlamini said the 36-year-old man was under police guard in hospital.
The Star