A resident has expressed his frustration after not being assisted by the police when he was robbed at a traffic light.
Fuzail Bhayat, a resident of Linden, was travelling home at about 8.30pm on 17 October with his wife when they stopped at a traffic light on the corner of Solomon and Smit streets in Vrededorp.
He explained that he saw two men approach him on the driver’s side. “One of them had a gun, which he pointed at me.”
Bhayat said in the heat of the moment, he managed to grab the gun from the suspect and point the gun at him. While all this happened the other suspect took his keys. Bhayat is qualified in armed training and self-defence. “When I grabbed the gun I found it had no bullets.
“In the meantime, two other suspects were at the passenger door when they took my wife’s cellphone and purse.”After they were done, they just casually walked down Solomon Street as if nothing had happened,” said Bhayat.
In the hope of possibly catching one of them, Bhayat got out of his car to run after them only to find they had they dropped his car keys. He ran back to the car and drove home to safety.
There he managed to track his wife’s phone using his phone and found it to be in Carr Street near the M1 offramp. Thereafter he called 10111 and the police assisted him with a reference number and told him they would send it to the relevant police station.
He received a call not long after from Johannesburg Central Police Station, and he said that they told him they would not go to the location as it was not safe to dispatch a car to that area.
Captain Walter Spencer of Linden Police Station explained that, in his experience, many of the phones that are tracked are accurate up to a couple of hundred metres. He said that people should always open a case when a phone is stolen and people should block their phones and get an ITC number – the number the network gives you as a reference that you blacklisted your phone. However, in more serious cases like hijackings and robberies, police do not wait for the number. He also added that they do not open cases for lost cellphones, because no criminal activity is linked to the loss.
Spencer concluded that it can be dangerous for a policeman to patrol an area by themselves.
