The Directorate of Intelligence Services (DIS) on Friday arrested Member of Parliament (MP) for Serowe South Tshekedi Khama, his wife Thea and his twin brother Anthony on a charge still to be known.
The trio were arrested as part of an ongoing marathon investigation into missing arms of war. As part of the investigations, the DIS has in the past also arrested and raided officials from Zebras Shipping, DIS former Director General, Isaac Kgosi’s preferred clearing agents.
The arrest of Zebra Shipping officials last year sparked a chain reaction of DIS senior and junior officers’ arrests, among them Deputy Director General Sehunelo Khunou.
Sources close to the investigations told the Sunday Standard that when the DIS conducted an audit of its inventory and interviewed a number of arms suppliers it discovered that some firearms which were imported by the spy outfit were never delivered to the DIS Armory. An investigation into Zebra Shipping which was commissioned by the former DIS Director General to clear the imported arms revealed that the arms arrived into the country but never made it to the DIS armoury.
DIS director General Peter Magosi has been on the trail of DIS “missing” arms since 2018. Magosi has in the past complained that the secret service under Kgosi did not keep an inventory of its arms and spy equipment and it was difficult to determine how many rifles had been procured and where they might be.
Appearing before the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) in 2018, Magosi said . “Our main challenge is surveillance equipment and weapons of war procured outside the country and the only solution is to go to the companies where they were procured and ask how many were procured from them,” he told the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) in 2018 that trying to trace the DIS rifles and spy equipment was a difficult undertaking.
Tshekedi, Thea and Anthony were arrested in Gaborone on Friday morning and accompanied DIS officers to search their company (Seleka Springs (Pty) Ltd) premises opposite the offices of the Directorate on Corruption and Economic Crime.
The DIS Public Relations Officer, Edward Robert confirmed the arrests to the Sunday Standard saying, “ the DIS is engaging with a number of people among the honourable Tshekedi Khama and Mr Anthony Khama in relation to the ongoing investigation over the missing arms. The nation should be assured that the investigations is being carried out within the confines of the law. There are established processes that are followed when carrying out the investigations. Those processes are being followed even in this matter and those processes are being guided by the DIS Act. These are not the first investigations the Directorate has carried out and certainly they are not the last,” said Robert.
Robert, could not dwell much on the latest developments in relation to MP Khama’s search save to say: “These issues border on operational processes. We are not going to divulge the content of our investigations because they are on-going,”
Sunday Standard understands that the Khama family members have been on the radar of the DIS for some time.
