Johannesburg - Police Minister Bheki Cele said he will soon be heading to Malawi to retrieve South African vehicles stolen and smuggled across the border.
“At least 22 000 cars are stolen in South Africa every year, and most of them are taken over
our borders to neighbouring countries,” Cele told reporters at a briefing at Tembisa police station in Ekurhuleni.
“Malawi has 300 of these vehicles, many of the cars are stolen from Gauteng,’’ .
He said he was in Mozambique recently, and witnessed stolen
luxury vehicles with Gauteng registration numbers on them being driven around in Maputo.
“They do not even change the number plates. I wont tell you who drives them, but I can tell you that a lot of the stolen Gauteng cars are being driven freely in the streets of Maputo with no problem.
“I will be meeting authorities there soon to attend to this issue.’’
On cash-in-transit heists, he said the police were intensifying operations because heist gangs were leaving Gauteng for other provinces such as Limpopo, the Free State and Mpumalanga.
This was as a result of Gauteng being watched with a hawk’s eye to combat heists, said Cele.
Forty two cash-in-transit
heist suspects have been arrested since June.
‘“Fifty nine firearms were confiscated, 47 explosive devices and 152 rounds of ammunition as well as millions of rand have been seized. The biggest cash haul was in Mthatha (Eastern Cape), where police recovered stacks of cash running into millions, packed and hidden.’’
The police arrested four of the 15 most-wanted criminals in
the country.