Killing for Profit: Exposing the Illegal Rhino Horn Trade (37 page)

Christmas Eve 2008

Near midnight, on a dark road outside Vaalwater in Limpopo province, Captain Herman Lubbe is looking for poachers. He is in an unmarked police car and driving fast. Behind him, the town’s lights fade into the blackness until they’re only a muddy, orange glow. It has been a long day and it promises to be an even longer night.

Lubbe, a veteran of the police’s Stock Theft Unit, has received a tip-off that a syndicate he’s been tracking is on the hunt. The men, he’s been told, are in a red Toyota Corolla, registration HDL814NW, and they’re driving in the direction of Melkrivier, fifty kilometres north-east of Vaalwater. It will take him until dawn to find them.

At 5 a.m. on Christmas Day, he spots the Toyota leaving Melkrivier. It’s maroon, not red, he notes. And the registration begins with HLD, not HDL. There is only one occupant. Lubbe hangs back and trails the vehicle. He suspects the man behind the wheel is the getaway driver and that the rest of the gang has been dropped off at a game farm to look for rhino. The driver will probably wait in Vaalwater until they need him. A police informant is tasked with keeping an eye on the vehicle.

Lubbe’s instincts prove to be right. At 11 a.m., the driver takes off. He’s in a hurry. Lubbe takes up a position at the entrance to Leseding Township on the Vaalwater/Melkrivier road. The car’s description and its registration number are radioed to police units deployed to watch the main access routes
around Vaalwater. Lubbe is in luck. The car drives right past him and turns into Leseding. There are four occupants. He bides his time.

A short while later, Lubbe sees the car leaving the township. This time, there are only two occupants. The vehicle is heading in the direction of Bulgerivier. Lubbe radioes ahead: ‘Pull them over,’ he says.

When he gets there, the Toyota is at the side of the road. The doors are open. A policeman is guarding a suspect. The other occupant, Lubbe hears, high-tailed it the second the car came to a halt. He is barefoot, wearing a blue T-shirt and camo shorts. He won’t get far. Lubbe carries out a cursory search of the car. Near the driver’s seat, he finds a cellphone and a pair of tennis shoes. In the back is a loaf of bread, three bottles of still water and a two-litre Fanta Orange. He opens the boot.

Inside is a large axe and a .303 hunting rifle fitted with a Bushnell scope. A live round is in the chamber and ten more are in a magazine. There are five soft-nosed .303 rounds, designed to expand on impact. In hunting parlance, they are used to ‘maximise the wound channel’. The remaining bullets are all sharp-point ammo, although the tip of one has been cut off, presumably to ensure it fragments when it hits the target.

Then there’s the clothing: a camouflage overall and a green windbreaker the suspect says he bought in France, and brown army fatigues, which he claims belongs to the runaway, a man named Washington. Inside the car Lubbe finds a Malawian driver’s licence made out to Washington Phiri Kateka. The suspect hands his wallet to Lubbe. There’s the usual stuff inside: bank cards, a driver’s licence and a bit of change. But there is something else that catches Lubbe’s eye. It’s an access card used by SARS officials. The name on the card reads ‘Michael Peega’.

Lubbe sweats Peega for information, but he denies that he’s a poacher. He works for SARS, he says, but is currently operating undercover for SAN-Parks. His handler is someone called Lumbe, who is based in the Kruger National Park. Lubbe doesn’t believe him. (Later the ‘handler’ is identified as Andrew Lumbe, a senior environmental crime investigator at SANParks. He tells police he knows Peega from Phalaborwa, but is adamant that he is not his handler and that Peega is not a SANParks ‘CI’ – a confidential informant.)

Peega keeps talking. He says that he met Washington in Pretoria and drove with him to Vaalwater, where one of Washington’s friends took them to a game farm to shoot rhinos. But they didn’t find any rhinos and were on their way home when the police pulled them over. Peega says he dropped two men off in Leseding before they left. They have an AK-47 with them. He can show the cops where it is.

Peega leads them to a tin shack in the township: Number 59B. Police storm inside. A woman is home with her baby. Her name is Sarafina Baloi. Next to her, on the ground, is a black tog bag, and inside it an AK-47, two rounds of ammunition, a hand-axe, a black balaclava and an army jacket. There’s also a passport made out in the name of Joshua Elias Baloi. The woman says the bag belongs to Joshua, her brother. Lubbe arrests her and her husband, Joe Mashaba. As they drive away, Sarafina points to a man in the street. ‘There’s Joshua,’ she says. Police confront him. He denies that the bag or the AK belong to him. But his face matches the photograph in the passport. Lubbe takes him in too.

On 26 December, Washington is arrested. He’s still barefoot. He tells Lubbe he’s from Mozambique. His real name is Washington Hlongwane. It is not long before he confesses. He works for a man called Ignatius, he says. He shoots the rhinos, hacks off the horns and Ignatius buys them. Washington says he uses a .303 rifle, which he’s hidden away in Brits near Pretoria. He’ll take the cops there.

12 January 2009

Police officially inform SARS, in writing, about Peega’s arrest. His employers haven’t heard from him in weeks, and he had been on leave when he was apprehended. A day later, Peega makes a confession, one that he later claims was extracted from him through torture. Lubbe laboriously fills in the requisite forms. ‘Michael Peega states further voluntarily …’ In neat black capitals with a cheap plastic pen, Lubbe writes: ‘Who recruited you to be part of the syndicate?’ Then Peega’s answer: ‘Josias recruited me. He asked me to help him shooting rhino. I know Josias from Phalaborwa, where I was a trained as a soldier.’

Gradually the tale unravels. Late in November 2008, ‘Josias’ (whose surname is not mentioned in the confession) meets Peega at Gold Reef City, a casino and theme park in Johannesburg. He introduces him to Washington and another man with the unlikely name of Gogo, which means ‘grandmother’ in Zulu. Their target is the Sable Ranch, a high-security game farm and breeding facility twenty kilometres outside Brits.

It is night when they get there. A poacher’s moon lights their way through the bush. Washington takes the lead. Gogo carries the hunting rifle, a .303. He’s used it before, he says. ‘The ammunition is perfect.’ Peega is wearing his French camouflage. Washington shows them where to go to find their prey. ‘Just wait. The rhino will show up,’ he promises. But the rhino don’t turn up, and at sunrise they blearily make their way home.

A week later, they try once more, again without success. Peega waits in the road for Washington and Gogo. In the distance, he hears a shot. A short while later the two men scramble into the car. They heard the shot too, they say. It wasn’t them.

At this point in the interrogation, Peega contradicts himself. Apparently referring to the first incursion, he tells Lubbe: ‘The first time I took a shot at a young rhino. They were three and I tried to shoot the young one for maybe I will get some shots at the other. I think I missed.’

The men aren’t deterred by their failures. In December they travel to a new target, in Thabazimbi. Again they enter a game farm at night and walk to a waterhole, where they wait in vain for rhinos. Eventually they give up. Peega hefts the .303 over his shoulder and they hike to another waterhole, where he and Washington fall into fitful sleep. Gogo sets off on his own. It is early morning when Washington and Peega are startled awake by a gunshot. They follow the sound until they find Gogo.

‘Gogo told us that he had shot a small rhino … Washington cut the two horns with an axe. We went out of the farm and was [
sic
] picked up on the road,’ Peega says.

Later that day, in a hotel room in Gold Reef City, the men meet to divide the spoils. Ignatius is also present. He calls himself Igi. He’s the intermediary between the poachers and a Chinese man in Cape Town, who flies up to Johannesburg to collect the horns. Igi tells the men that they ‘could get better
money if we had a bigger rhino horn’. Peega, Washington and Gogo each receive R10 000 for their efforts.

Their next foray takes them into the Kruger National Park. Peega, who accompanies them to Phalaborwa, spends the night carousing with old army buddies. Washington heads off to meet someone he knows can help. Rodgers Mathebula works in the park as a traffic warden. He has an insider’s knowledge of its byways and pathways. With Washington in tow, he crosses through the Letaba Ranch to the north of the town and into the Kruger. They spend the night there looking for rhinos, but eventually give up and leave empty-handed in the early hours of the morning.

Vaalwater is next. Peega describes meeting Baloi at a ‘tin house’ in the ‘location’.

‘Me and Washington slept in the car until early light. Two persons went with me and Washington in an easterly direction. The one guy told us to stop. Baloi drove the car away. Me, Washington and another guy with [an] AK-47 rifle went into a game farm. I carried the .303 rifle with the telescope. Washington carried the axe.

‘We didn’t see any rhino and we left. We were picked up by the same Baloi. In Vaalwater we dropped Baloi and the other guy. Me and Washington travelled back in the direction of Thabazimbi. On the way we saw a police car that told us to stop. I was arrested.’

16 January 2009

The SAPS announces the arrests. Eleven suspects have been charged ‘in connection with the poaching of black and white rhino’, national police spokesman Colonel Vish Naidoo says in a statement. They include five Mozambicans, three Chinese nationals, two South Africans and one person of ‘unknown nationality’. Two AK-47s, four .303 rifles and R16 000 in cash have been seized. The Chinese suspects are two Cape Town–based ‘businessmen’, Jianwei Wu and Zhongda Yu, and a medical doctor from Bruma Lake in Johannesburg, Wei Guan Hu. The Mozambicans include Joshua and Sarafina Baloi, Joe Mashaba and Washington Hlongwane.

Peega’s name is listed, but police say nothing about his links to SARS. The statement quotes the police’s head of detectives, Commissioner Ray Lalla: ‘The police members, in close co-operation with SANParks, spent days and nights – even Christmas Day – tracking these suspects and have put their all into ensuring that those responsible for the killing of these beautiful creatures for blood money were brought before the courts.’

Details about the investigation begin to trickle out. Peega’s undoing, it turns out, was the arrest of Mathebula, the Kruger traffic warden, on 12 December 2008, two weeks before the ill-fated Vaalwater trip. He’d been picked up after helping two poachers gain access to the park to look for rhinos. He’d dropped them off to conduct a recce near the park’s Phalaborwa Gate, with five loaves of bread and eight litres of Coca-Cola to sustain them. Game wardens found the men hiding in the veld a day later and arrested them. They ratted on Mathebula, who, in turn, implicated Washington and Peega. Investigators found a .303 rifle in Mathebula’s possession.

After the arrest of Peega, Washington and the others, the police set a trap for the Chinese buyers at Bruma Lake. It is a simple buy-bust operation. Undercover cops lure the men to a meeting. Four rhino horns, weighing twelve kilograms, are sold to the Chinese for R360 000. Surveillance teams capture everything on camera. Police move in and arrest the men. They find a cellphone, which is used to send photographs of rhino horns to prospective dealers in Hong Kong.

On 9 February, Wu pleads guilty to two counts of illegally receiving and possessing rhino horns. He is sentenced to a R20 000 fine or three years’ imprisonment. He is given a further five-year suspended sentence and ordered to leave South Africa. The other Chinese are released on bail of R100 000 and R200 000 respectively and warned to appear in court.

Beeld
newspaper describes it as the biggest rhino horn case ever brought to book in South Africa. According to the charge sheet, it involves fifty rhino horns worth an estimated R20 million on the local black market.