Judge's report reignites Cato Manor death squad claims

Andrew Chauke, who heads the National Prosecuting Authority's South Gauteng division, has been cleared by the presidential inquiry into his fitness to hold office and told by President Cyril Ramaphosa that he has been exonerated

Sixteen-year-old Kwazi Ndlovu was asleep on the couch in his family's lounge in eSikhawini when policemen kicked down the door at 3am and fired four shots from an R5 rifle.

Blissfully unaware that Kwazi had just been struck and killed by three of the bullets, his mother, Lindiwe, was ordered by the men in blue to stay in her bedroom with her husband and newborn while they searched the house.

When she was finally allowed into the passage, she found one of the men standing in front of the lounge, blocking her view.

She could only see past his shoulder to Kwazi lying on the couch, so still and so quiet that, to her, he looked as though he was fast asleep.

Desperate to get to him, she was instead ordered out of the house, because police said they were still questioning the boy.

Believing Kwazi was safe, she carried the newborn to the car, dropped the baby off at her mother's house and returned to find her yard taped off.

Shocked and horrified, she pushed through the tape and rushed to the lounge window.

"I saw my son lying on the couch with the bullet wound on his arm and there was a firearm that was put next to him," she said.

Kwazi's death on April 1 2010 was one of 23 murder cases brought against the Cato Manor organised crime unit, according to the report of the presidential inquiry into prosecutions boss Andrew Chauke , released by President Cyril Ramaphosa's office on Thursday.

Chauke was suspended last year over his role in bringing the charges, but an inquiry into his fitness for office found that there was evidence to prosecute the unit after all.

Nine members of the unit were charged over what had happened to Kwazi, but none has ever been successfully tried for it.

The unit, based at the Cato Manor police station west of central Durban and accused of operating as a death squad, was blamed for shooting dead about 28 people between 2008 and 2011, most of them taxi association members hunted down after a senior policeman was ambushed and killed in KwaZulu-Natal.

The 23 dockets, some involving more than one killing, were rolled into a single racketeering case in 2012, which accused members of the unit of operating together as a criminal enterprise.