Two men \u2014 Joel Kabene and July Sithole \u2014 have been sentenced to 15 years in prison for tampering with and damaging copper cables belonging to Telkom in December 2020.<\/p>\n
The Sunday Times reports<\/a><\/strong> that the court also sentenced the Mozambican pair to two years imprisonment for being in South Africa illegally, which will run concurrently with their other sentence.<\/p>\n They were arrested after being caught cutting copper cables belonging to Telkom valued at R10,000 by Combined Private Investigations (CPI) personnel in Pretoria.<\/p>\n The damage caused to the cabling impacted Internet lines, resulting in a loss of income for businesses in the area.<\/p>\n “Prosecutor Rabia Ebrahim asked the court to impose the minimum prescribed sentence of 15 years’ imprisonment regardless of them being first-time offenders,” the Sunday Times quoted NPA spokesperson Lumka Mahanjana as saying.<\/p>\n Copper and aluminium cables hold significant scrap value, making them a promising target for thieves in South Africa, and theft of these materials has been a prominent issue in the country.<\/p>\n Earlier this month, three cable thieves were sentenced to a combined 39 years’ imprisonment<\/a><\/strong> as they were found guilty of stealing at least 564kg of aluminium cabling belonging to Eskom.<\/p>\n “The three were arrested\u2026 in a sting operation at a scrap yard in Boksburg, after the scrap dealer tipped off an Eskom security contractor,” Eskom said.<\/p>\n “A sting operation, which led to the arrest of the three cable thieves, was set up between the scrap dealer, security contractor and the police at the scrap yard.”<\/p>\n However, the thieves \u2014 Bafana Masilela, Antonio Munyathi and Gutu Gumba \u2014 were only handed the sentences after 47 court appearances.<\/p>\n Gumba was sentenced to 15 years imprisonment, with Masilela and Munyathi each receiving 12-year sentences.<\/p>\n “The convicts remained in custody since their arrest and appeared 47 times in court before they were sentenced,” Eskom said.<\/p>\n According to Eskom’s Gauteng safety, health, environment, risk and quality manager Kith Maitisa, the theft of cables, overhead lines, transformers, and conductors costs the utility around R4 billion per year.<\/p>\n In May 2022, Metal Recyclers Association trade adviser Donald Mackay proposed banning trading scrap metal for cash<\/a><\/strong> to combat the theft of cable infrastructure in South Africa.<\/p>\n “There are a couple of low hanging fruit that we should immediately go after that could make a big difference quite quickly,” Mackay said.<\/p>\n “One of them is to prohibit the trade in scrap for cash. The moment you trade anything for cash, traceability becomes a challenge.”<\/p>\n “That’s something that’s relatively easy to do quite quickly,” he added.<\/p>\n Mackay explained that the South African Police Service had a specialised copper cable theft team in the past, which no longer exists.<\/p>\n “There used to be specialised people within the police. For example, in Cape Town, the metro police had “copper heads”, which were a specialised team looking at copper theft particularly,” he said.<\/p>\n “The South African police, in fact, had an arrangement to have people specially trained to identify stolen scrap and taught how to inspect a yard to identify problematic dealers.”<\/p>\n Mackay added that the Metal Recyclers Association is reinitiating conversations with the police to get the programme back on track.<\/p>\n The pair of thieves were caught cutting Telkom cables and were found to be in the country illegally.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":341076,"featured_media":444800,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_facebook_post_id":"","_sma_instagram_post_id":"","_sma_threads_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[5192,181,35,109],"class_list":["post-457323","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-security","tag-cable-theft","tag-eskom","tag-headline","tag-telkom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/457323"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/341076"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=457323"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/457323\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":457325,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/457323\/revisions\/457325"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/444800"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=457323"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=457323"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=457323"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nNow read: Twitter helped South African police track down July riots instigators<\/a><\/h3>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"