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Piet Rampedi

OR Tambo International Airport has been hit by a number of robberies and heists in recent years.

In one of the most brazen robberies, in 2005, 25 men robbed an SAA cargo plane of R96 million without a single shot being fired. They just boarded the plane, demanded the money and disappeared. Seventeen suspects were later arrested.

In May of that year part of the recovered money was again stolen from a police safe at the Benoni police station.

Five suspects, among them three police officers, were arrested in connection with the theft. Two of the suspects and two potential witnesses have since been shot dead.

Part of the money taken in the latest robbery last week, an estimated R8 million in local and foreign currency, was some of the money recovered after the 2005 heist, a police source said. It not clear why this money was still in the safe.

Last week’s robbery also included foreign currency recovered two months ago from a money-laundering suspect.

In April two men – Freedom Mukwevho and Bongani Thabethe – appeared briefly in the Wynberg Magistrate’s Court on four counts of armed robbery linked to attacks carried out on people who had just entered South Africa from the airport.

This was the second case in the same court dealing with robberies linked to OR Tambo. Mukwevho and Thabethe were positively identified as being part of a gang that committed at least four robberies on tourists arriving in Johannesburg, including Oluremi Obasanjo, the wife of Nigerian former president Olusegun Obasanjo, who was ambushed at the Michelangelo Hotel in Sandton and robbed of R50 000.

OTHER AIRPORT HEISTS INCLUDE: