Johannesburg - Police nicknamed them Ali and Tony – one is a man they believe is the kingpin behind cigarette truck hijackings in Gauteng, the other the main flyer who operates in the Western Cape.
Although they operate across the country, supposedly separately, police believe they are linked.
The hijacking of trucks is one of the crime trends that has seen a dramatic increase in the past year, said police spokesman Lieutenant-General Solomon Makgale.
Suspected police involvement, the use of jammers to block tracking devices, and a lack of witnesses all make this a difficult crime to solve.
Makgale said police had formed a task team to focus on truck hijackings in Gauteng.
According to a police document, there are three types of modus operandi that hijackers use to grab trucks and the goods inside.
The most common method is for truck drivers to be pulled over by cars that have sirens and blue lights. These cars are often marked police or metro police cars and a hijacker dressed as a police officer will ask the driver about the goods they are carrying on the truck trailer.
The driver is then forced into the boot or the backseat of the truck and is driven around for hours, before being dumped on the side of the road.
With the second method, hijackers wait on the N3 near a spot where prostitutes wait.
When a driver stops for sex, the hijackers grab the truck.
And in the third, hijackers dress as road workers putting up road blocks or barricades.
When the truck stops, it is taken.
Warehouses are rented to store the stolen goods.
Often trucks that are hijacked in Gauteng are later found in other provinces such as Mpumalanga and KwaZulu-Natal, as well as across the country’s borders in Zimbabwe and Mozambique.
In almost every reported hijacking incident, the truck’s tracking signal is blocked.
The jammers work in such a way that no signal from the trackers or cellphones can be detected by any control room monitoring the trucks.
Makgale said the task team made a breakthrough in Gauteng in June when a cigarette truck with R11 million worth of goods was hijacked in Boksburg.
Police traced the truck to a house in Florida where they discovered 19 suspects and recovered a firearm which had been stolen in Dobsonville a month earlier.
The house belonged to a man called Mohamed Abdul-Malik, who was later arrested in Roodepoort when he handed himself in.
Makgale said there was a man they had been looking for called Tony Ezeahurukwe.
According to their information, he is a hijacking mastermind in Gauteng.
Although not directly linked to this case, police started asking questions about him after making the arrests.
Ezeahurukwe then allegedly approached a Lieutenant-Colonel Siphungu from the Gauteng Provincial Investigation Unit and offered him R10 000 to make the case go away.
But the Hawks were waiting for Ezeahurukwe to make his move, and in a sting operation, they arrested him at Norwood police station.
Across the country in Cape Town, Makgale said the task team identified Abdi Ahmed Hadji, who uses the alias Ali, as a kingpin.
There is a warrant out for his arrest.
Police believe he buys cigarettes from people who rob British American Tobacco (BAT) trucks.
He allegedly pays hijackers R1 000 each and he then sells the cigarettes at 50 percent less than they are normally sold.
The Star