Amanzimtoti connection to AKA’s murder

As the murder case of A-list musician Kiernan ‘AKA’ Forbes and his friend Tebello Motsoane continues, police have announced that the men arrested for his death may also have been involved in the 2022 fatal shooting of a taxi owner in Doonside, Amanzimtoti.

Seven suspects have been arrested for AKA’s shooting, but the police charged them with other crimes they are suspected to have been involved in.

Five have appeared in the Durban Magistrate’s Court, while the other two are being held in Eswatini (formerly Swaziland), awaiting extradition back to South Africa.

AKA was gunned down in Durban as he exited a restaurant on Florida Road on the evening of February 10, 2023.

The two men held in Eswatini, and one of the five that have already appeared in court, are suspected of shooting and killing William Kunene (57) at Seadoone Mall on November 9, 2022. Kunene was shot in broad daylight as he finished loading groceries into his car, only three months before AKA was shot and killed.

The KZN director of public prosecutions, advocate Elaine Harris, has started the extradition process of the two men, who are brothers.

Advocate Harris said they come from a family that owns a fleet of taxis, and it has been suspected that Kunene’s killing had something to do with taxi route disputes. In the affidavit that was published by the Times of Eswatini newspaper, advocate Harris confirmed that the two brothers have been identified to have been involved in the Seadoone Mall shooting.

“The deceased (Kunene) was a taxi owner involved in taking over a taxi route at Malagazi. The suspects gave instructions on how the murder would be committed. One of them also determined the roles to be played by each assailant in the commission of the murder,” read the affidavit in part.

KZN police commissioner Lieutenant General Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi has confirmed that forensic testing has shown that a firearm that was recovered while investigating the AKA case is the same one that killed Kunene.

“The strategy that we employed was that after identifying these six suspects, we looked at the parallel cases they are involved in, arrested them for those cases, kept them in custody and did not charge them for the AKA case while we continued investigating. The reason is that we wanted to get all the suspects, especially the organiser of the hit,” said Mkhwanazi.