Police Minister Bheki Cele. Picture: Gallo Images/Darren Stewart
The latest developments in the murder case of renowned former Bafana Bafana goalkeeper Senzo Meyiwa are only the beginning and much more is yet to come, Police Minister Bheki Cele said on Monday.
This followed his announcement that five people have been arrested in connection with Meyiwa’s murder.
The minister briefed the media on the developments in Pretoria, alongside national police commissioner Khehla Sitole.
Monday, 26 October, marked six years since Meyiwa was shot and killed at the Vosloorus home of his girlfriend, actress and musician Kelly Khumalo.
The suspects are expected to appear in the Boksburg Magistrate’s Court on Tuesday.
The charges they face will be divulged during their appearance.
In announcing the arrests, Cele said speculation had been rife. It attracted media attention, and it resulted in leaks which touched on some aspects of the probe.
Cele said the leaks had potentially jeopardised and compromised the investigations “badly and sadly”.
The minister added there were some instances where the case could have been at a particular stage – but, because of leaks, was held back, according to investigators.
“Unfortunately, when those leaks happened, there is not even a courtesy of confirming them – but even when you want to confirm with us, how would you expect the minister to confirm the leaks, but people continue to write?
“I do want to tell your clan (the media), that it does compromise the investigations going forward. Let me stop there and say we will be investigating, including the people you say are from ourselves (SAPS). Because those, I believe, are worse than the people that receive the information,” Cele said.
He said: “But we really want to take this matter very seriously because it does impact big time in resolving and solving the cases, when you create the court on the media and allow people to speculate and talk things that are not there.”
The minister said: “This is the beginning on this one, much is still, we believe, coming. It’s a big story.”
Speaking at the briefing, Sitole said the police had to use different tactics to pin the alleged suspects to the murder.
“At the last moments of the investigation, we had to use different investigation tactics and among those was the application of cold case principles.
“When you apply cold case principles, you conduct a cold case analysis against all individual suspects. Apart from criminal activities relating to the killing of Senzo Meyiwa, through cold case analysis you also discover other cases and you then begin to tie that suspect down with all prominent cases from the cold case analysis,” Sitole said.
The national police commissioner said there was now new and different evidence compared to previous instances, adding that ballistic evidence was important.
He said the case had complexities which required a lot of investigating tactics to be applied by authorities.
“At the present moment, what is key is the ballistic evidence relating to the firearm and, up to this far, it is only now that we found the weapon. We have been looking for the weapon for the whole duration of the investigation.
“But with the final tactics applied, we found the weapon and, fortunately enough, the weapon is ballistically connected to the crime scene,” he said.
Sitole said authorities want to avoid conducting the probe in the public domain and would at this stage not be divulging whether there were any confessions. He said it would form part of the court proceedings.
He said more details on whether the killing was a hit or not would also be revealed during the court process.
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