By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
Senior Hawks officer Colonel Gavin Jacob faced intense questioning at the Madlanga Commission of Inquiry after admitting to lying about the storage of 541 kg of cocaine worth R200 million which was seized in 2021.
Jacob is the commander of the SAPS Durban Serious Organised Crime Investigation Unit.
The missing cocaine vanished from police custody and remains unaccounted for. Despite the scale of the theft and years of scrutiny, no arrests have been made.
He told the commission that he did not contact neighbouring police stations such as Durban Central, Brighton Beach and Umbilo, because he assumed they lacked storage capacity for his exhibits.
Jacob said: “These stations know the lab takes a long while to house, destroy, and analyse those exhibits. No station wants to give away their SAP13 space, more especially a station like Maydon Wharf which is close to our harbour.”
He explained that his reluctance to use the local stations stemmed from past experience where they might have space initially but would later ask him to remove his exhibits to accommodate their own.
Commission chair Justice Mbuyiseli Madlanga objected, saying that cannot justify not asking about storage.
Jacob conceded that it was “not factually correct” to say he had exhausted all avenues and that he “lied”.
“How can you say you exhausted all stations while you simply made an assumption?” Madlanga asked.
Jacob said: “I will give you a practical example about Umbilo (police station) and maybe it will help shed some light. I think it was 900kg that was seized in the area and it was the next day that the lab took reception of these exhibits but those exhibits were stored in an unused cell, a single bricklayer cell and the station could only accommodate them for a limited period of time.
The commission heard that Jacob chose to take the cocaine to Isipingo Police Station before it was later moved to the Hawks’ offices in Port Shepstone under instructions from his superior, Brigadier Campbell Nyuswa.
Evidence presented to the commission suggested that an operation later in the same year (2021) involving 999kg of drugs was successfully accommodated, undermining Jacob’s argument that suitable storage facilities were unavailable.
The Evidence leader Advocate Sello Mahlape also turned her attention to Jacob’s decision to exclude the Local Criminal Record Centre (LCRC) from the operation, despite national instructions requiring forensic officials to attend major drug seizures.
Jacob admitted that he deliberately deviated from the prescribed procedures because of previous negative experiences with LCRC officials.
He told the commission that investigators had often been disappointed by delays and incomplete forensic reports.
While defending his reasoning at the time, Jacob acknowledged that the decision had been wrong and said he would not repeat it in future.
Sello suggested that the decision to bypass LCRC processes and transport the drugs to Isipingo was deliberate and formed part of an effort to avoid proper SAPS recording procedures.
She put it to Jacob that the cocaine was never intended to be formally recorded through standard SAPS systems and was instead destined to be registered only as a cryptic SAP13 exhibit.
Jacob rejected the allegation.
Jacob said the inquiry had highlighted risks associated with failing to follow established procedures and accepted that investigators should no longer exercise discretion in deciding whether to involve mandatory role players.
Before proceedings started, Madlanga ruled that the evidence of “Witness I”, scheduled to testify on 9 June, would be heard partially in camera.
Media organisations will be prohibited from publishing the witness’s identity or image, while only portions of the testimony will be broadcast through an audio feed.
Meanwhile KwaZulu-Natal Hawks head Major-General Leseja Senona’s testimony has been postponed after a member of his legal team has taken ill. The new date for his testimony is yet to be determined.