The Hawks detective who investigated the murder of Anti-Gang Unit detective, Lieutenant-Colonel Charl Kinnear, has admitted that there is no direct link to alleged underworld kingpin, Nafiz Modack, to the murder, besides pinging.
This shocking revelation was made at the Western Cape HIgh Court yesterday where Captain Edward du Plessis was grilled by Modack’s Legal Aid lawyer, Advocate Bash Sibda, as he presented his client’s version of the charges levelled against him.
Modack and 14 others face a vrag charges linked to the murder of Kinnear and the attempted hit on criminal attorney William Booth, in the mammoth underworld trial currently being heard by Judge Robert Henney.
The testimony of Du Plessis, who has been on the witness stand for several months, is at the centre of key evidence against Modack and his co-accused Zane Kilian in the pinging of Kinnear and his colleagues in the months leading up to Kinnear’s murder in September 2020.
During the explosive cross-examination, Sibda insisted that footage of the shooting in front of Kinnear’s Bishop Lavis home played a critical role in establishing a link between the shooter and the pinging of Kinnear’s cellphone.
Sibda told the court that it was the state’s case that the pinging was a “tool of murder” and defence teams were determined to establish if the shooter had used a cellphone on the day to determine Kinnear’s whereabouts.
Sibda hammered Du Plessis, saying: “You can’t rule out that the shooter was acting on his own, man alone, with nobody influencing him or communicating with him and for his own reasoning he wanted to kill Colonel Kinnear.”
The detective conceded that the Hawks were never able to find the killer.
“We don’t know who the shooter is and we didn’t find him and anything is possible. But the thing that is very important is that Accused 2 [Kilian] testified that shortly after the murder, Accused 3 [Ziyaad Poole] phoned him and said he must destroy the phones.”
Du Plessis highlighted the similarities between the hit on Booth and the murder of Kinnear and said the court could make inferences, but Henney jumped in and asked what direct link there was to Modack.
“Besides the instruction to ping Mr Kinnear, what other link is there?” asked Henney.
The detective conceded: “There is no direct link.”
Earlier during cross-examination, Modack was also uitgevang for manipulating the ping list by handing it to his lawyer, as he implied that Kinnear had been pinged in the same location as alleged Sexy Boys gang boss, Jerome “Donkie” Booysen.
During the questioning, Du Plessis maintained that the dates given by Modack’s lawyer were not correct and later it emerged that Modack had manipulated the list when handing it to Sibda.