An Inside Enemy: Shocking Testimony Reveals Cops Attacked Their Own Hit-Squad Task Team

In a hearing that peeled back the layers of South Africa’s underworld, a former leader of the elite Political Killings Task Team (PKTT) has laid bare a terrifying reality: the very police force he served was, at times, trying to kill him and his colleagues.

Lieutenant Colonel Ntate Khumalo delivered staggering testimony at the Madlanga Commission, describing three separate armed attacks on the PKTT where the evidence pointed directly to the involvement of fellow SAPS members.

“Bizarre” Betrayal in Masinga

The most chilling incident, which Khumalo described as “bizarre,” occurred in Masinga in December 2022. After leaving a police station, his team noticed a vehicle tailing them. When they accelerated, the pursuer sped up. Then, a passenger leaned out and opened fire on the police vehicle with a pistol.

“Members were able to return fire, and two of them were shot, but not fatally,” Khumalo stated. The subsequent investigation revealed a devastating truth: the driver was a police officer, and the firearm used to shoot at them was a state-issued police weapon. An officer had handed a gun to a member of the public to execute a hit on his own colleagues.

A Pattern of Internal Hostility

This was not an isolated event. Khumalo revealed that the team survived two other attacks. In 2019, the team was ambushed at night in southern KZN using an R5 riflea weapon exclusively issued to the South African police. In another December 2022 incident in Phoenix, a suspect who opened fire on four PKTT officers at a petrol station was also identified as a SAPS member.

In each case, the assailants were not just common criminals; they were insiders armed with state resources.

The High-Stakes World of the PKTT

Khumalo’s testimony provided a grim window into the PKTT’s work investigating political assassinations and the killings of traditional leaders. He explained that masterminds invest “huge money” to avoid capture, from bribing witnesses who then “recant from their original statement because they fear for their lives,” to paying for hitmen’s legal defense.

He also alleged that case dockets were tampered with and sometimes made to disappear, crippling investigations. “They know that if we mess up with the docket there won’t be clear evidence to link [them],” he said.

The testimony paints a picture of a justice system at war with itself, where an elite unit hunting political assassins found itself in the crosshairs of a corrupted element within its own police force. For the members of the PKTT, the enemy wasn’t always in the shadows; sometimes, he was wearing the same uniform.

{Source: Citizen}

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