“To interdict … the SAPS from killing Bevan Loftus” — issued on the Friday

On Friday 31 March 2023 an urgent application was issued in which a father sought, in his own words to the Commission, "inter alia to interdict Captain Deena Govender and the SAPS from murdering my son". No order was granted, and the application had not been served. The following afternoon — Saturday 1 April 2023 — Bevan Loftus was shot dead in a flat in Morningside, Durban, together with four other men: Sihle Zondi, Ryan Santos, Chase Fynn and Michigan Hippolyte. Two witnesses put that sequence on the record independently. Mr Len Barnabas John, Deputy Director of Investigations at the Independent Police Investigative Directorate in KwaZulu-Natal, told the Commission on day 157 that it was issued on 31 March, "the day before the killing of Bevan Loftus by the task team led by" Lieutenant-Colonel Govender, and that "Gregory Loftus had an interdict application issued specifically to prevent the killing of his son". On day 158 Gregory Loftus himself put the date in the record: "The interdict application was issued on Friday the 31st of March 2023." The statutory frame matters here. Mr John is attached to the body that, under the Independent Police Investigative Directorate Act 1 of 2011, "must investigate any deaths as a result of police action", and he took the Commission to the section 28 duty on a station commander or any SAPS member to "immediately after becoming aware, notify the Directorate". His evidence was that the killings show "a range of disturbing features that are consistent with a deliberate extrajudicial killing paid for by an organised crime competitor". Naming Clive Naicker — rendered "Naciker" in the transcript — as "the alleged leader of a drug and tow trucking gang", he told the Commission that "there is at least a prima facie case" that at that person's instance "Lieutenant Colonel Deena Govender deployed the task teams to kill Mr Bevan Loftus". He described a pattern he said ran wider than one incident: a modus operandi "designed not to arrest suspects … but rather to kill the suspects"; crime scenes at which "all suspects and occupants present when the shooting takes place are killed by the task team"; false number plates used "so they cannot be identified when shootings take place"; and a standing explanation "that the deceased shot first at them before they could shoot". On the financial side he put to the Commission that "cash deposits aggregating to R2,343,050 were made into the bank accounts of Lieutenant-Colonel Dina Govender and his wife", and that a further R200,000 was "paid in cash into a trust account of the conveyance attorneys handling the transfer of a 2.35 million property which they had purchased". None of this has been tested to a finding. The Commission has made no findings on any of it, no court has convicted anyone named here, and every proposition above is evidence led before an inquiry rather than a proven fact. The officers' own account is in the record in the form of their statements — that they entered the flat, that men rose from a couch, and that a shoot-out followed. What can be said without qualification is narrower and is a matter of dates: an application naming a serving officer and seeking to restrain a killing was issued, and the killing it described occurred the next day, before that application had been served or heard.