POLOKO TAU
T WO SECURITY guards escorting a cigarette delivery vehicle were shot and killed in Orlando East in what is believed was an attempted robbery.
A pair of black shoes and blue rubber gloves strewn next to the driver’s door of an escort vehicle and a blood-splattered tarred surface marked the crime scene yesterday morning.
A man lay dead in the passenger’s seat with a bullet wound to his body while the driver, who had been shot in the face, was rushed to hospital, where he died.
Police believe the assailants had waited for a British American Tobacco delivery vehicle and its escort vehicle to arrive so that they could rob it. Captain Phephi Matlou-Mteto, however, said nothing was taken after the shooting, which occurred at about 9am.
The escort vehicle was parked about 150m from the delivery vehicle, which had stopped at a shop when the unknown men pounced.
A witness at the scene said a car came down the street and parked next to the escort vehicle, which had two occupants, before four balaclava-clad men jumped out and opened fire.
“The passenger was shot while trying to pull out his gun and died on the scene. It happened very quickly and they (gunmen) quickly left, leaving another man crying in pain with a horrible gunshot wound on his face,” a witness said.
Matlou-Mteto said the police had not made any arrests by late yesterday. “We can’t say at this stage how many suspects we’re looking for,” she said.
In a similar incident involving a British American Tobacco delivery vehicle, a security guard in a car escorting it was shot dead in an attempted robbery in Rockville last November.
A month later, Gauteng police arrested three men in Soweto suspected of belonging to a syndicate that hijacks cigarette delivery trucks in Joburg.
After the arrests in December, Joburg metro police spokesman Chief Superintendent Wayne Minnaar said the suspects had been positively linked to 25 hijackings over the past three years and to stolen cigarettes to the value of about R10 million.