Cape Town - Gangsters are buying huge amounts of ammunition using sports firearm licences, which allow them to “basically buy as much ammunition as they want”.
Police General Jeremy Vearey, who heads up the provincial police’s operation focused on clamping down on gangsterism, said gangsters with sports firearm licences – as opposed to self-defence ones – were buying high volumes of ammunition for battles with rivals.
A firearm dealer in Cape Town, who did not want to be identified, said it was virtually impossible to monitor how much ammunition someone could buy. He said a person with a dedicated sports firearms licence could “basically buy as much ammunition as they want”.
“And that’s the thing – we don’t know what shops the guy has gone to before and what he got there. There’s no control,” he said.
The dealer said a firearm owner with a self-defence firearm licence could buy up to 200 rounds of ammunition at a time.
“But people buy 200 rounds here, then they go to the next shop and buy 200 rounds there and then another shop and another. There’s no system in place to show they’ve already bought ammunition,” he said.
Late last year police visited his business several times. The dealer said it was difficult to determine where ammunition was going to be used, because the buyers could use it wherever they chose and did not always provide their correct addresses.
Officers were trying to track down certain firearm licence holders to try to check if their licences had been fraudulently issued.
This week Vearey said the police’s focus was on guns. “Our emphasis is still on cutting the supply lines of firearms to gangs.”
Vearey said each week police confiscated about 34 firearms.
It has also emerged that as part of a national investigation, police are looking into the origin of the ammunition used in the gang wars in Manenberg. Residents have reported that rival gangsters had been using automatic weapons.
“The high ammunition volumes in shootings are linked to (the bigger investigation). There have been reports of fully automatic and semi-automatic firearms being used. It’s part of the bigger investigation.”
Vearey said the volume of ammunition was believed to be connected to a case involving others already facing criminal charges. This included the arrest of three police officers from the Central Firearm Registry – Priscilla Mangyani, Billy April and Mary Cartwright, in June.
The case is expected back in the Cape Town Magistrate’s Court in the next few weeks along with that of alleged gang kingpin Ralph Stanfield, the nephew of dead Cape Town gang boss Colin Stanfield, and his girlfriend Nicole Johnson and sister Francisca Stanfield.
The syndicate came to light through investigations into Stanfield’s murder.
Weekend Argus