Willem Els: Another high-profile hit in the Assassination Nation

South Africa has been rocked by the second assassination of a private security company owner. In his latest interview with BizNews, Willem Els of the Institute for Security Studies (ISS) speaks to Chris Steyn about the assassination of DJ Warras who was gunned down brazenly yesterday in the Johannesburg CBD under a CCTV camera in front of a hijacked building. He was killed on the eve of the memorial service for Witness D. Marius “Vlam” van der Merwe who had testified at the Madlanga Commission and had vowed to expose links of State officals to illegal mining, but was gunned down in front of his family. “If you have a problem, you're making a lot of money, you wanted to remove a problem, you call in the inkabi. The inkabi gets paid a few thousand rand and it just removes your problem.” Els charges that the organised crime syndicate king pins are “very often in government, in a political sphere, because they need to be able to afford protection for these syndicates. And these syndicates won't be so brazen if they don't know that they are being well protected.” Els warns that if government does not get the message and step up to change the status quo and come up with real good strategies to reclaim “our cities and our country…we might not have a country to work for and to live for”.

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