Search for missing officers intensifies

Six days later, a crack team of investigators, and a R350,000 reward ... yet the families of three missing police officers and their colleagues are still in the dark about their whereabouts.

“Every minute that passes triggers something. What is happening? Are they even alive?” asked Sipho Cebekhulu, Const Linda Cebekhulu’s father.

Cebekhulu, 24, along with his girlfriend, Const Boipelo Senoge, 24, and colleague Const Keamogetswe Buys, 30, left Bloemfontein in the Free State for Limpopo on Wednesday evening last week and have not been seen since.

The trio was last seen at an Engen garage near the Grasmere toll plaza on the N1 in southern Johannesburg on Wednesday night.

National police spokesperson Brig Athlenda Mathe said investigations revealed that the last point their tracking device was picked up was at Gillooly’s interchange, east of Johannesburg.

The police said the trio’s vehicle’s tracking device and their cellphones have been off since later on the night they disappeared. Their VW Polo registration number is JCL 401 FS.

“It’s a matter of time before there is a breakthrough ... we have launched a full-scale investigation and pulled together various experts and seasoned police officers,” said Mathe.

Cebekhulu and Buys work for Operation Vala Umgodi, a unit that fights illegal mining, and were on their way to work at the time. Cebekhulu is a crime intelligence officer and Buys work in the unit’s cybercrime division.

Senoge works at the Park Road police station charge office in Bloemfontein. She was on leave at the time she accompanied Cebekhulu and Buys to Limpopo. Sipho Cebekhulu believed his son and Senoge would return in a few days as his wife was supposed to undergo an operation on Friday, two days after he left for Limpopo.

“We are told ... that the car was tracked up to Midrand, but their phones went off just after Grasmere,” Cebukhulu said. “That is the little that we know about this. It has been five days of uncertainty. His mother is still in the hospital, and she doesn’t know about this. We did not tell her.”

Senoge’s father, Paul Senoge, said he realised something was wrong when his daughter did not message him to tell him that they had arrived safely in Limpopo.

He became worried and called Cebekhulu’s family to ask if they had heard from him. They were also in the dark.

Cebekhulu and Senoge had been in a relationship for a while and planned to get married, he said.

“We started calling hospitals and police stations to find out if there had been an accident. It’s been incredibly difficult for our family. I can’t sleep, and it’s hard to eat.”. 

He suspects their disappearance might have to do with their work for Operation Vala Umgodi.

“It is obvious because we can’t trace the car. There’s no evidence of a hijacking or that they’ve been dumped somewhere. But I remain hopeful they will come back alive,” he said.

Buys’s husband, Lwazi Dabi, shares Senoge’s father’s suspicions. 

Dabi said though there were no threats to his wife’s life that he was aware of, “she always told me her job was stressful and dangerous”. 

“She would share the kinds of cases she was handling. Whoever is behind this likely knew they were in Bloemfontein and returning to Limpopo.” 

He also said it could have been that they were hijacked because the vehicle they were travelling in is known to be a hijacking target.

“[But] if it were a hijacking, we would probably have found them by now,” he said.

Dabi last saw his wife when Cebekhulu and Senoge picked her up at about 9.45pm on Wednesday.

He later went to bed, and when he woke up about 4am, he saw that Buys had sent him a text at 10.30pm asking if he was already asleep.

Dabi said one of his wife’s colleagues visited him and told him that police suspected the trio had been kidnapped.

“I am trying to stay positive, but nothing makes sense,” he said. “I keep replaying some of the conversations we had just to make sense of what could have happened to her.”

The police have appointed investigators from Gauteng and the Free State to look for the missing trio. They have also established a 24-hour venue operational centre to co-ordinate search efforts and offered a R350,000 reward to anyone who may have information on the three.

SowetanLIVE