Durban - Chaka, the police dog whose body was found two weeks after he went missing while chasing suspects in Mariannhill, was stabbed four times as he was bringing one of them down.
A postmortem done on the 2-year-old Rottweiler - who partnered Constable Elliot Mdadane of the Shongweni K9 Unit - has revealed that he was stabbed in his head, between his ribs near the heart, on his chest and in his stomach.
“If you look at the wounds, they are all the left side. We assume he was biting the suspect on his arm when it happened,” Colonel Thulani Sithole, head of Durban’s dog unit, said on Tuesday.
“We think it happened soon after he was released.”
Chaka’s disappearance led to an 11-day search involving volunteers and helicopters, horse patrol units, tracker dogs and motorbikes.
Unfortunately, it ended in heartache when his decomposing body was found in the reeds of a river bank, apparently not more than 20m from where he was last seen.
Sithole said he believed the suspects - who had broken into a factory and fled from police - had still not been caught.
But when they were caught, and if there was sufficient evidence, they would be charged with Chaka’s death.
Sithole said Mdadane had not yet got a new canine partner, but was hoping to be allocated one soon.
Chaka is the third police dog to be killed in KwaZulu-Natal in the past month.
Earlier this month, Sky, a 5-year-old Belgian Shepherd who partnered Constable Eugene Rautenbach, was shot while pursuing armed burglars in Pietermaritzburg.
Last month, Storm was electrocuted when he ran into an illegal electrical connection in Copesville while pursuing suspects.
A former dog unit member who did not wish to be named said handlers should, as far as possible, always stay with their dogs and release them on puppy lines.
“They are no match for armed suspects,” he said.
But another veteran dog handler said he “would have done exactly the same thing”.
“From my knowledge of the events, both handlers were 100 percent by the book,” he said.
The Mercury