Officially, the three would-be armed robbers who met a tragic end last month at a Block 6 house in Gaborone were killed by members of the Special Support Group, the paramilitary unit of the Botswana Police Service.
Interestingly though, there is doubt, even among some police officers, about who really killed the robbers and about whether BPS should have claimed principal credit for the success of this operation. Sources mention another set of operatives who, unbeknownst to civilians, swarm city Gaborone streets in plainclothes, packing the biggest and blackest guns: military police (MP). Not only do MP operatives work very closely with SSG patrol teams, they are tuned in to the police radio and in that way, have access to the freshest and unfiltered intelligence about security threats in town.
Sunday Standard has established that one of the armed robbers who fled the scene was a BDF corporal. Some of the illegal Zimbabwean immigrants who have overrun Botswana and engage in crime (especially armed robbery) have a military background and more than passing familiarity with the use of weapons in life-and-death situations. It would be in bad form for us to repeat the tribal differentiation that a police source makes but there is belief that depending on tribe, Zimbabwean criminals will likely behave a particular way. The source says that Tribe A criminals mostly limit themselves to house burglary while, on the basis of strong culture-wide belief about pre-colonial military prowess, Tribe B’s tend to be more daring and carry out most armed robberies in Botswana.
“A [Tribe B] criminal can stab you with a knife and voraciously lick all the blood off the blade to intimidate the victim,” he quips.
When joint patrol teams have to resolve a security threats involving guns, MP naturally take the lead on account of having received superior training. The source cites two other reasons why MP takes the lead.
“SSG officers are not too keen on engaging with armed robbers who may be more experienced in weapons handling,” says the source adding that on the other hand, MP operatives tend to be “trigger-happy.”
That the robbers were found and killed at a house means that good intelligence was leaked to the response team in good time – which intelligence would have been shared with the MP operatives. They would have arrived at the house either together with the SSG or around the same time. The uncertainty is over who engaged with the criminals, two of whom escaped and are still on the run.
Some members of the public are themselves helping precipitate the spate of house robberies in well-to-do neighbourhoods. Two months ago, Sunday Standard published a story about an opposition politician who related his ordeal about a brief stay in prison. He said that he was promised P30 000 if he could provide information about Indian or Chinese businesspeople who habitually keep large sums of money in their houses. A few years ago, Btv ran a story about a gang of Francistown street children who travelled to Sua Pan and stole well over P100 000 from the house of a Chinese businessman. We don’t have any information about circumstances of the Block 6 robbery but the practice of keeping large sums of money in houses and not in the bank has resulted in a new genre of armed robbery.
