Testimony before the Madlanga Commission has revealed that the guns used in the murder of Vereeniging engineer Armand Swart were later linked to at least twenty other murders, including those of high-profile figures such as DJ Sumbody, DJ Vintos, and businessman Don Tindleni.
This calls for a complete forensic overhaul of the South African Police Service (SAPS), backed by independent oversight and accountability measures to restore professionalism, transparency, and public trust in policing, according to Ian Cameron, Democratic Alliance (DA) Deputy Spokesperson on Police.
He said the Madlanga testimony “exposed a national crisis in SAPS’s forensic and ballistic systems.”
The DA pointed out that the first SAPS ballistic report on these same weapons contained multiple factual errors, missing analyses, and even the wrong case numbers.
The national head of ballistics, Brigadier Mishak Mkhabela, admitted the original report was “error-riddled” and had to be rewritten several times by the same analyst, Captain Itumeleng Makgotloe, whose mistakes were defended as “typos.”
Pages were replaced, affidavits resubmitted, and at least three versions of the same report were filed — all before critical evidence was verified.
“Even more disturbing, evidence leader Matthew Chaskalson SC highlighted that Makgotloe appeared to have known of the guns’ links to other murders months before the case was registered on the Integrated Ballistics Identification System (IBIS), raising concerns that organised crime networks within or connected to SAPS may have accessed or influenced forensic information,” Cameron said.
“Such conduct reflects more than incompetence — it signals systemic corruption and manipulation of evidence at the heart of SAPS’s crime intelligence and forensic functions.”
The DA subsequently called for an independent forensic and ballistics audit of all major SAPS casework from the past five years; comprehensive skills development in the Forensic Science Laboratory to restore technical standards and eliminate political interference; and immediate integrity testing and lifestyle audits of the top 100 SAPS generals and senior managers, starting with those in the Detective Service, Forensics, and Supply Chain.
“If integrity testing is not enforced, nothing else will change. South Africans cannot expect justice from a system where ballistic evidence can be altered, delayed, or leaked to criminals,” Cameron concluded.
