The reading public has a sordid love affair with crime stories and here is one without a sick, twisted plot but almost negligible irony and deep-seated and repulsive manifestation of avarice.
On Facebook, I befriended someone whose friend recently posted a picture of a woman stripped to her skirt in a store, where her torso was padded up with small-sized tins of baby formula and disposable nappies. I had meant to write about that but got side-tracked. That was two weeks ago.
Last week, a lady in one of the many Facebook pages I belong to, posted that she stumbled upon a man fondling her eight-year old daughter in a deserted street-passage and trying to do worse to the girl but couldn’t. She went on to bite the man’s ear off.
A few days ago, another Facebook friend that I did not know personally posted a few pictures of alleged burglars on his Timeline and called on everyone to share the pictures with the hope that someone would identify the “criminals.” The post had links to Fight Crime in Botswana website that soon consumed me.
There are a few, less than clear pictures showing hooded men outside a house in different angles. There are also three videos showing the three men creeping about, peeping through windows and looking and gawking at the security cameras. In one of the videos, one of the men makes a gesture like he is using a walkie-talkie.
“No, it looked like one, but that’s what I was hit in the head with. He was covering his face from the camera. On first viewing we thought it was a walkie-talkie.”
These are the words of Nikhil Mistry; director of Ativio, Africa Operations. He also doubles as the chairman of Fight Crime in Botswana. He has two plasters on his head and one of the fingers.
“When they hit me, I only saw the end of it. It looked like a very big chisel, or a crowbar. I saw it being raised over my head. It could have been a crowbar or a pick-axe. I saw the sharp end of it, not the whole thing. They didn’t hit me with the sharp-end, they hit me with the side of it,” he said, talking about the scariest moment when he, a community activist against crime, became a victim for the fourth time in 2013.
The time on the security camera reads 11:38 PM. The date is July 12.
At that time, Mrs. Mistry was still in the living room, watching TV. Nikhil was in the bedroom reading, while all this was happening. They had security cameras installed just recently because someone had smashed the bedroom window and grabbed phones just two weeks before. In total, this was the fourth time they have been burglarized. This was the first they’ve used violence.
In the video, that was only viewed after the break-in two hours later, one of the men can be seen covering his face and then proceeding to pear through the window.
We went to bed shortly after this; around midnight. We were awoken at 01:15 am when the alarm went off. I heard loud banging noise and I thought someone was trying to gain entry through the kitchen door or the front door. Our phones were gone and we realized that we had been locked inside the bedroom.
The burglars had entered through the en-suite bathroom window, meaning they cut through 25mm slab burglar-bars to gain entry. All the while, the Mistrys never heard anything. The men proceeded to the bedroom, grabbed the phones and locked the couple inside the bedroom.
Nikhil surmises that only two men went inside as he could hear rustling sounds outside, which prompted him to yell out for help through the broken window. On remembering that he had a Neighbourhood Watch whistle, he ran to grab it and blew hard at it. The two men, who were still inside the house ran to the bedroom door to unlock it. Nikhil and his wife now had the desperate attempt to block entry in to the bedroom with their own bodies, while the men rammed themselves hard against the door. Mrs. Nikhil decided to go out through the broken window to get help while her husband lost the door jamming battle with the armed men.
Now face to face with the burglars, Nikhil received two blows to the head with a blunt and heavy object. One of the burglars made menacing jabs in the air with a sharp instrument that looked like a screwdriver to scare him. They demanded money from him and while he turned his back to bring them his coin box, the men took off through the same window they had come in through.
Mrs Mistry soon returned with the neighbours and found her husband bleeding. One of the neighbours was a doctor at one of the government clinics in Tlokweng where he went to retreat Nikhil. A contingent of police and soldiers on patrol arrived shortly almost at the same time with G4S.
After counting his loses, doing the police station scene and all that, A couldn’t go back to sleep. Noticing that one of his laptops had survived, he decided to track his IPhone. He had heard that two guys had been picked by G4S and handed over to the police. However, the police at the Gaborone West Police Station had released the two suspects under circumstances that are not yet clear to Mistry.
Before the break of dawn, say around 4 AM, Mistry was out with one of the G4S’ supervisors, tracking his IPhone over the internet. The first signal took them to the entrance of Gaborone Dam. When they approached the gate, thinking that the cellphone had been tossed or something, the signal started moving again. It then dawned on Nikhil that he was metres away from the guy who violated him, his privacy, his home.
The little dot on the GPS map kept on moving till it reached the dam wall and the pursuers thought they had the man cornered. When the car couldn’t go further, they watched dot walk along the drying dam, walk past Water Affairs and BPC lots and crossed the road into Old Naledi. The pursuit got so hot to a point where Nikhil and the G4S supervisor knew that their man was in or near 3 particular houses in Old Naledi. The man is not in real time, so Nikhil had to refresh his browser to zone in at the man. However, each time after updating, they found that he had moved from where he was before. Then the phone battery died and Nikhil lost the signal near the bridge in the vicinity of Therisanyo Primary School and Kudumatse Road. According to Nikhil’s IPhone tracker, it showed that his phone was switched on Thursday at 11:00 AM.
According to their website, Fight Crime in Gaborone is a PRESSURE GROUP which has been formed to be a representative of the local community to provide a platform in which people can engage Central Government, Local Government, Religious Leaders, Partnerships and the Business Community, in constructive discussion and debate about strategic policing, crime and community safety issues.
Their purpose is to provide a platform for effective consultation and information flow in all directions between all stakeholders.
They envisage empowering people who find the levels of crime in Botswana unacceptable to STAND TOGETHER in order to get their voices heard.
“Hopefully, this will result in Government prioritising the fight against crime,” it reads. Nikhil said everyone is aware of slow response time, lack of vehicles and phones ringing unanswered at police stations. Although he joined the Fight Crime in Botswana organization as chair four years ago, he seems to be four-time unlucky this year.
He appealed to members of the community to join the organization, and help with resources to ensure that the organisation grows to benefit more residents and citizens.
The aims of FCIB are listed as:
To support BPS engagement with the community to help secure effective, citizen focused, accountable and responsive policing.
To increase the capacity of FCIB members to be informed of local crime and disorderly activity.
To increase the capacity of FCIB members to more proactively monitor and actively influence local decision making, plans and prioritisation of the local delivery of policing and related community safety activities.
To provide a forum for people to monitor, challenge and be informed of the priorities of Crime and Disorder.
Through this forum, our many diverse communities will have the opportunity to share their unique perspective and be heard, as well as to learn about one another.
The FCIB website provides useful links to important information such as directions and contact numbers for all police stations in Botswana, weekly police crime statistics, pictures and stories of wanted criminals and fugitives and other community resources.
