Daylight cable theft
These suspects might have had inside information as they knew where the cable line would be found.
JOHANNESBURG SOUTH – Three men wearing blue work suits dug up about 30 meters of the city’s cable in broad daylight in a stunt that made it almost impossible for residents to suspect wrongdoing.
Julio returned home from holiday with his wife to find three men digging a hole near his Rewlatch home in Impala Avenue on Wednesday January 7, around 16:00. He asked the men what they were doing and they replied that they were digging a hole for a new gas pipe.
According to Julio, these men appeared to have been digging the hole for a couple of hours before his arrival and did it without attracting attention to themselves by acting as if they were legal.
Neighbours in the area told Julio that they also saw these men but did not suspect anything, especially as there was no power interruptions.
When Julio arrived he saw a hole but because these men knew what they doing, they had found the cable but kept it covered with soil and continue to dig until their cutting points, where they cut on both ends and suddenly what seemed like an innocent hole gave birth to a thick copper cable, approximately 30 meters long.
When the men suddenly removed the cable and started rolling it, Julio captured photos of the driver of a white bakkies with the registrations number: MHV 538 GP.
City Power’s investigation team arrived quickly after they were called to the scene to confirm that it was indeed a daylight cable theft.
However, what residents found strange was that these men knew exactly where to start digging although the cable stretched from the other side of the street through an underground line, which could not be detected as it dipped underground from a pole a couple of meters away from where it was dug out.
Moreover, one of the witnesses who drove by Impala Avenue around 11:00 said that there were six men doing the digging of the cable, said to be a backup power cable.
