JOHANNESBURG
Illegal immigrants crime culprits - study
Posted Mon, 12 Apr 2004
Foreign criminals are responsible for a large proportion of the serious crimes committed in South Africa, according to an article in Rapport on Sunday.
Thousands of illegal immigrants are convicted every year in South Africa for crimes such as robbery, murder, rape and drug-trafficking, a study from the Strategic Studies Institute at the University of Pretoria has found.
A professor at the institute, Mike Hough, said almost a quarter of the cases in the Johannesburg Magistrate's Court in January 2004 involved foreigners, and the number was increasing all the time.
He said most of the foreign criminals were Zimbabweans, who were generally involved in bank robberies, fraud and drug-related offences. Nigerians were the second most common culprits, often for drug-related crimes. Mozambicans came third, convicted of robbery and fraud.
Police were not able to verify these results because at present the South African Police Service (SAPS) did not maintain that sort of data, said Captain Ronnie Naidoo, national police spokesperson.
"Unfortunately I can't give you an answer. We don't keep statistics on foreigners," he said on Sunday.
He said police did record the nationality of the criminals they arrested, but it was not collated.
The last study done by the SAPS was in 1994, which found 12 670 illegal immigrants involved in serious crimes.
Although they are often sent back to their countries of origin, many end up in South African prisons, said Hough.
Hough estimated that at present R344 458 a day was spent keeping foreigners in prison.
He said his study was not trying to increase xenophobia in South Africa, but that there were signs of "foreign involvement in the South African crime scene".
Sapa