Joburg bread war claims three lives

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Johannesburg - The business of baking bread in Joburg has become so deadly that deliverymen have to travel with armed bodyguards. This comes after three drivers were killed, two injured and numerous others threatened for doing their job. They all worked for Morning Harvest, a new bakery that has been operating for just more than a year in Joburg. The murders have angered the Pakistani community that the Pakistani ambassador in South Africa, Abdul Jabbar Memon, has written letters to Gauteng police commissioner Lieutenant-General Mzwandile Petros, requesting that police protect the Pakistani bakers and that arrests be made over the murders of the Pakistanis. According to the owners of Morning Harvest, Raja Baber Mahmood and Afzal Ahmad, as soon as they opened their doors for business, they started being threatened.

Then in May last year, the first shooting of their drivers took place.

Adil Hussain was driving in Alexandra when he was shot through the chin. He survived with broken teeth and a broken jaw.

In September, Nasir Shah was killed in Thokoza. He was shot five times.

His murder was followed by the murders of Tamraiz Ahmed in Tembisa and Qaiser Abbas in Alexandra.

All three men were shot numerous times, with nothing stolen.

“Tamraiz was only 22 years old. His mother is not recovering. She cries all day. He was supposed to get married two weeks after he died,” said Mahmood.

“The drivers are being threatened,” said Ahmad. They are scared. People in the baking world are being killed and we have to have armed guards. There is more than enough business for everyone.”

He said each bakery makes around 60 000 loaves a day, with a profit of 30c a loaf.

Rumours of a bread mafia have circulated since 2011, when the owner of Nature’s Dream Bread, Shaun Tuna, along with senior prosecutors and police officers, appeared in court for more than 40 charges, including racketeering, corruption, defeating the ends of justice, extortion, fraud and forgery.

The State said at the time that three of Tuna’s former employees – Sergio Goncalves, Patrick Nunes and Ricardo Pereira – who had opened their own bakery, Nature’s Harvest, and their employees had allegedly been harassed, arrested, charged, intimidated and threatened.

The State provisionally withdrew its case last July.

A year later, Tuna and five of his employees have again been arrested – this time on a charge of attempted murder.

The Hawks raided Tuna’s bakery, Super Harvest, last week. Tuna handed himself in to the police after the raid.

Hawks spokesman Paul Ramaloko said Tuna had been arrested for a case in which a man was allegedly shot after witnessing another man being tortured.

Ramaloko also said they were investigating numerous cases to do with a bread mafia, including a robbery in Ormonde last week that police interrupted. A shootout broke out and three suspects were killed.

In the case Tuna has been arrested for, he is alleged to have tortured one of his employees after his bakery was robbed.

The employee was accused of being involved in the robbery.

Witnesses, who cannot be named, said the man was beaten, burnt and dunked in water.

While the alleged torture happened, a group of men heard the screams and came to see what was happening.

They were allegedly told to “f*** off”, and when one man didn’t move away quickly enough, he was allegedly shot in the legs with a shotgun.

The man who was shot, Muhammad Hussein Baloch, has plates in his legs and still suffers from the pain of shotgun pellets lodged in his leg.

Some of Tuna’s business associates said on Sunday he was being set up in the hope that his arrest would lead to the closing down of his bakery.

They came to visit Tuna at the Protea police station and said he was an innocent man.

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The Star