Less than 47,500 rounds of ammunition of the more than 1.2-million units looted from a Durban container depot during the July 2021 unrest have been recovered.
In a parliamentary response police commissioner Gen Fannie Masemola said 17 people have appeared in court for the theft of ammunition. However, police have not recovered much of the cache.
Experts say there is little doubt the stolen ammunition has flooded the black market and is likely to be used by “a variety of criminals”.
Stolen rounds - 1,202,000
Recovered rounds - 47,352
“While the majority may have serviced the KwaZulu-Natal illicit market, it is also possible that some of this ammunition could have flowed into other provinces. Ammunition is a relatively easily transportable commodity,” said Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC) senior analyst Jenni Irish-Qhobosheane.
She said the bulk of the stolen ammunition, more than 800,000 rounds, was9mm rounds, the most popular for various brands of handguns in South Africa.
Irish-Qhobosheane said the calibres of ammunition in the stolen cache are mostly used in gangland fights, robberies and assassinations.
“The theft also takes place in a province beset by criminal violence and targeted assassinations. GI-TOC analysis of assassination trends has found that between 2015 and 2020, 38% of all recorded assassinations in South Africa were in KwaZulu-Natal — the highest proportion of all provinces.
“KwaZulu-Natal recorded the highest number of hits across all different categories isolated by the GI-TOC’s analysis, including assassinations linked to the taxi industry, in personal feuds, organised crime and political assassinations. The rate of political assassinations in KwaZulu-Natal between 2015 and 2020 was almost five times that of the next highest-scoring province, Gauteng,” she said.
Our research indicates that access to ammunition is critical to the functioning of the illicit firearms market and that over the last decade criminals’ access to ammunition has increased significantly
— Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC) senior analyst Jenni Irish-Qhobosheane
Manhar Parshotam, founder of Dragon Protection Services, which had boots on the ground during the unrest, said the size of the stolen cache was concerning as it showed intent.
South African Gunowners’ Association chair Damian Enslin said the organisation has been calling on police to establish more specialised firearm units to tackle illegal weapons.
“We have also been calling on police to re-establish proper crime intelligence so that organised criminals can be combated as well as the sources of illegal firearms be investigated and dealt with,” he said.
Gun Free South Africa researcher Claire Taylor said illegal ammunition, a single-use item, requires consistent resupply.
“Unlike firearms, which are uniquely marked at the point of manufacture, batches of ammunition rounds, which are manufactured in production runs that number thousands to millions of units, are marked with the same lot number, meaning that no single item is uniquely marked. This puts ammunition at particular risk of being anonymous and easy to divert as it cannot be traced back to source.”
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