The Unified Café, nestled in a quaint corner of Florida, on the corner of Rebecca and Naomi Streets, is a perfect soft target for criminals – even more so if they pretend to be cops.
The café is a family-run business and according to one of the partners, Mohammed Roubl, they have been robbed so many times in the past 20 years that he has lost count.
On Friday, 26 October, at about 11.34pm, armed robbers struck once gain, but this time under the guise of being policemen checking the family’s permits to be in the country. Four men, two wearing police issue bulletproof vests, entered the café, but two immediately went back outside, presumably to keep watch. The two bogus ‘cops’ then demanded to see the store owners’ and employees’ documentation to see if they were legally in the country and had work permits.
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The men then told Rouble and his brother, Saiful Islam, that they wanted to go to the storeroom cum office since they “suspected we were hiding drugs”, said Islam. While they were in the storeroom with a third member of the family, one of the other perpetrators, dressed in civilian clothes, returned and saw Roubl on his cellphone. Assuming that he was trying to call the police, which Roubl was indeed trying to do, he confiscated the cellphone and a short while later, took another cellphone.
It is uncertain whether Islam, while outside, managed to flag down a police vehicle or if it coincidentally stopped at the café, but CCTV footage shows a policeman in full uniform entering the shop about halfway into the drama. The two perpetrators keeping watch then fled the scene in their vehicle. Islam told the policeman, whose partner was still outside, that there were two criminals in the storeroom along with one of his family members. The two policemen then took up a position across the road behind a tree.
Meanwhile, per the CCTV footage, the two perpetrators came out of the storeroom (after having stolen in the region of R7 000). One took off his bulletproof vest and neatly put it behind the entrance door while the second continued wearing his. When they stepped outside they realised what was going on and blindly fired two shots in no particular direction.
The two then split up, with one fleeing down Naomi Street in the direction of Ruth Street while the other fled down the same street, but in the direction of Maud Street. The police did not return fire and a security reaction officer and customer pursued the person fleeing in the direction of Ruth Street and managed to arrest him and hand him over to the police.
Islam claims that the arrested suspect appeared in court on Monday, but that Florida Police said “there was not enough evidence”, regardless of the two police officers witnessing the incident and the CCTV footage.
At the time of publication, the Florida Police spokesperson could not be reached for comment. The Record is in possession of the CCTV footage but does not want to publish it without the police’s permission, in case doing so might jeopardise the investigation.
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