Page 153 - Hawks News Today

Fraud has taken the lead among crimes in the country investigated by the Hawks.

With 19 suspects killed in a shoot-out with the Hawks, there is no-one to interrogate in the investigation into the heavily armed gang found in a house in Limpopo last week.

Hawks head Godfrey Lebeya held a media briefing in Pretoria on Monday, outlining various achievements over the first four months of the 2023/2024 financial year.

The head of the Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation (DPCI), better known as the Hawks, said on Monday he hopes to resolve the staffing shortages plaguing the unit by next year.

The Hawks presented stats on their successes in the first quarter of the 2023/24 financial year revealing most arrests were fraud-related

Initially, police said 18 suspects were killed but while processing the scene on Saturday, they uncovered another body.

Former Hawks boss, Berning Ntlemeza, believes the state was wasting money going after former president Jacob Zuma when it could be using it to fix roads in the rural towns of the Eastern Cape.

The 18 suspected robbers killed during a shoot-out with police at a house in Makhado on Friday are believed to have been members of a syndicate involved in a number of cash-in-transit heists in Limpopo, Mpumalanga and Gauteng.

Two former government officials have been sentenced for corruption and money laundering linked to the abalone trade, the Hawks said.

A man who tried to defraud the Road Accident Fund of R750,000 for a fake accident has been handed a five-year jail sentence suspended for four years.