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South African Police Service (SAPS) ballistics expert Capt Laurence Makgotloe appeared in court in connection with allegedly intentionally sabotaging the murder case of engineer Armand Swart, who died in a hail of bullets on April 17, 2024.
Makgotloe was arrested at his home in Pretoria on Friday and appeared in the Pretoria magistrate’s court on Monday. The case was postponed until June 2 for a formal bail application.
According to the charge sheet, Makgotloe is accused of being an accessory after the fact to murder, defeating or obstructing the course of justice, and unlawful possession of ammunition.
The state alleges that on May 24, 2024, Makgotloe was aware that Swart had been murdered and that his colleague, detective W/0 Pule Tau of Pretoria Central, along with two members of the public, had been arrested and charged with the crime.
Makgotloe then “unlawfully” engaged in conduct designed to protect Tau and his co-accused from facing a successful prosecution.
To do this, he allegedly submitted numerous unreliable expert reports, prevented his peers from reviewing them, and stopped the Automated Ballistics Identification System (Abis) from linking the recovered firearms to other active crime scenes.
Furthermore, Makgotloe is accused of unlawful possession of ammunition without a valid licence, permit or dealer’s authorisation on May 24, 2024.
Swart was killed inside his car in Vereeniging on April 17, 2024. The hit was a case of mistaken identity, resulting from a whistleblowing incident involving Swart’s colleague, who had been planning to implicate the brother of one of the accused.
The suspects initially escaped the scene in a white Hyundai i20 but were later intercepted by police in a Mercedes-Benz parked along the road. Inside the Mercedes, police found two male occupants — who were subsequently charged with the murder, including the police member — along with 15 spent AK-47 cartridge casings.
A further search of the abandoned Hyundai i20 revealed:
- An AK-47 rifle loaded with 96 bullets (which was ballistically linked to the spent cartridge casings found in the Mercedes).
- Two 9mm pistols.
- Additional ammunition, including two spent 9mm cartridge casings.
When these ballistic exhibits were sent to the lab for examination on May 9, 2024, they landed directly on Makgotloe’s desk.
The ballistics section operates under a strict protocol. Once a case file is allocated to an analyst and a report is compiled, it must be submitted to a team leader for peer review.
The team leader checks for errors and orders the analyst to rectify or amend any mistakes before it undergoes a second review. Only when the team leader is completely satisfied is the report sent to case management to be scanned and handed over to the investigating officer.
Makgotloe’s final required step was to submit the data to the Abis system to cross-reference the weapons with previous crime scenes. Instead, he allegedly systematically manipulated the process.
“Instead of giving service to the deceased’s family and to the public at large, he behaved out of character by deliberately producing analysis that had the potential of setting free the accused in the Swart murder case,” read the charge sheet.
Makgotloe is accused of ensuring his findings were unreliable by creating multiple contradictory Section 212 reports using the exact same exhibits. To evade detection, he allegedly fabricated an urgent reason to retrieve the file from his team leader’s desk during a hasty review and never brought it back.
He pulled the weapons from the Abis queue before a case file number could be allocated, successfully preventing the system from revealing that the firearms had been used in numerous other crime scenes across the country.
TimesLIVE
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