Kidnapping, extortion and deaths — Kyle Cowan's book Mafia Land lifts the lid on cartels

Chapter 9 

The kidnapping mafia cash for cruelty

A shaky camera pans over a clear, blue sky. The sun is blazing. The man holding the camera is on a small, rusty fishing boat.  

On the ground, a man lies with his hands tied behind his back, a cloth over his mouth. The video shows a chain being tied to the man’s legs. At the other end of the chain is a small boat anchor.  

In a few moments, the anchor and the man are thrown overboard. The anchor makes a sizable splash, eclipsed by a much larger splash seconds later. The cameraman leans over the side of the boat, filming as the man descends.  

A ghostly image of the man’s eyes, staring up at the surface as he is dragged under, is visible for a split second in the churning water. 

It was murder. Cruel, cold-blooded. 

“There are dozens like this,” a private security industry source tells me. “They send them to their families. Imagine seeing this happen to your father, or brother?” 

The man who had been thrown overboard was the victim of a kidnapping. The video is profoundly shocking, and apparently, the result of an unpaid ransom. 

The videos of sexual assaults and tortures are shared with the families if the kidnappers believe they are taking too long to come up with the cash.  

The man who was murdered? His family couldn’t pull the money together.  

The brutal clips will be forever seared in their memory.  

Between April 2023 and March 2024, the South African Police Service recorded over 17,000 kidnap pings, a fourfold increase compared to the 4,000 a decade before. 

Read more: Caryn Dolley’s ‘Man Alone’ sheds light on police collusion with organized crime in South Africa

Not all these kidnappings are for ransom. Some are recorded as part of hijackings or robberies. If you are hijacked, and the perpetrators take you along with them, no matter the distance, the police record a kidnapping incident alongside the hijacking. Still, estimates are that 4%, just over 680, are estimated to have been kidnappings for ransom. That means that every day in SA, at least two people are snatched – their lives going from normal to horrific within seconds. More often than not, their desperate families cough up the ransom. A confidential police source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, showed me that internally, the SAPS had recorded ransom demands totalling a staggering R679-million between January 2024 and mid-June 2025. But it is unknown how much of that has been paid. The official figures say in the region of R8-million. But clearly the crime is far more lucrative – otherwise it would not be so popular. The country is in the grip of a kidnapping epidemic – and nowhere is the explosion of this crime  more prevalent than in Gauteng, with KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) in a distant second place.  

The scale of the growth in kidnappings is staggering. Between April 2013 and March 2025, 104,311  kidnapping cases were recorded by the police. But 48% – 50,503 of those cases – were recorded in just three years, between April 2022 and March 2025. Digging a bit deeper, of those 50,503 cases, 26,184 were in Gauteng.  

The province has seen the most dramatic rise in kidnappings – a 149% increase in 2021/2022 and another 74% increase on top of that the next financial year. 

If we accept the police’s belief that 4% are kidnappings for ransom, that leaves us with just over 2,000 people taken with the intent to obtain a cash payment for their return – all in just three years.  

The sharp increase in kidnappings in Gauteng in the 2021/2022 period is mostly to blame for the 79% national increase reported by police that year.  

It did not go unnoticed. Around the same time, the SAPS Crime Intelligence division established a National Anti-Kidnapping Task Team, sometimes  called simply the Anti-Kidnapping Unit.  

The business community was in uproar. Their partners, CEOs and others were being directly targeted. Major General Feroz Khan, the Crime Intelligence boss asked to head up the task team, acknowledged

that pressure on politicians resulted in the task team’s formation. In an exceedingly rare public speech at a conference in May 2023, Khan said complaints had gone straight to the top: President Cyril Ramaphosa.  

“Investigations of kidnappings started because of the Business Against Crime communities and large businesses that were complaining to our president and the minister and to politicians about the high levels of kidnappings in South Africa and the non-detection or arrest of perpetrators involved in this crime,” Khan said. 

Read more: Witness To Power — Mathews Phosa on how he avoided the Guptas’ honey traps

The task team did not have an immediate impact in the first two years. And while there has been an increase in kidnapping for ransom cases, the rate has declined from the stratospheric highs of 2021 and  2022.  

Between January 2024 and mid-June 2025, the unit was involved in 94 cases, with 98 kidnapping  victims where a ransom was demanded. A total of  168 suspects have been arrested, 48 vehicles seized and 37 illegal guns recovered, and so far around R1,2-million in cash found and stored in evidence, over the same time frame.

This intervention, and the unit, has been the subject of intense controversy – with constant allegations that private security companies working alongside the police unit are taking money from victims’ families. The private security companies involved deny this.  

Other private security companies in KZN and the Eastern Cape do similar work. Subterfuge and fear reign in this underworld. And the stakes are high. There are no guarantees, even if a ransom is paid, that families will be reunited, and often the families fear speaking out because they are worried about being repeat targets. Naturally, the argument is for more scrutiny – not less – as the criminals know very well who they should target.  

In what has become arguably the best argument for far stricter border-control measures, it appears as if the kidnapping racket has to some extent been imported from Mozambique.  

Mozambican nationals, wanted for kidnapping crimes in their home country, are often involved in similar crimes here.  

In June 2025, Mauro Mucambe Junior was killed in a shootout with police at an apartment complex in Fourways. This was after a R27-million demand was made for a Pakistani man who runs one of the largest food wholesale businesses in the province.

The warnings about Mozambique were written in plain sight. As far back as 2015, Julian Rademeyer, writing for the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC), published a chilling article outlining the crisis in that country – including the murder of a judge and a 13-year-old boy, Abdul Rashid, in October 2013.

“There are also indications that the kidnappings may be spilling over into other neighbouring countries, including South Africa,” Rademeyer wrote.  

“In 2013, kidnappers held a Pakistani business man from South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal province for 22 days until a ransom of a million rupees was  paid into a bank account in Pakistan. He later told police he had been shackled to a bed, beaten and repeatedly told that he would be killed. According to a local newspaper report the gang ‘is understood to

have links to an unchecked spate of kidnappings in Mozambique and are wanted for several cases across South Africa’.”

Rademeyer also referred to a report in SA’s Sunday Tribune that a 54-year-old dual South African-Mozambican citizen, Mehboob  Valimamade, had been abducted by a “brazen gang that kidnapped and held for ransom several millionaires in Maputo, Mozambique and are now believed to be operating South Africa”. 

Why the police failed to mobilise a massive response to well-known threats and allowed the problem to escalate to the disastrous levels it has come to will remain – like many other questions about the SAPS – a mystery.  

In its Organised Crime Risk Assessment for South Africa published in 2022, GI-TOC noted that, worryingly, kidnappings for ransom are likely to be one of the most under-reported categories “due to its  nature and persistent threat to the victim’s well-being and that of his/her family, even after release. It is also the most lucrative of kidnapping categories and one in which transnational organised crime groups are most prominently involved.” 

Kidnapping can also be used as a form of extortion, not just for cash payment.  

“We’ve had instances where, for example, the Post Office managers, sometimes female managers and their family, including their husbands, are held at gunpoint and then they are kidnapped from their home, taken in the middle of the night to the post offices because tomorrow is the Sassa payouts and the grants and that type of thing,” Khan said in 2023.

The Post Office employee’s family will be held, usually at gunpoint inside the home, while other armed men drive to the Post Office where they force  the manager to open the safes, the money is stolen and then the families are let go.  

“We found this also with people in the chemical industries where precursors for drugs are imported into the country and the families are held at ransom at  gunpoint and in very hostile conditions at home. The person who has the keys to the warehouses is taken back to the factories or the warehouses. It’s very organised. They have people who can operate forklifts. They have people who can operate the machines. Drivers with Code 14 licences get in there, load up the shipments, whatever is required. And only when the cargo is safe are the families released and then allowed to get back to their normal businesses and their normal routines of life,” Khan explained. 

The manufacturing and distributing of drugs is a business like many others, after all. Why pay for the chemicals needed – which costs money and leaves a paper trail – if you can simply steal them?  

Another common trend that has emerged, according to Khan, is people being followed from the airport – particularly people who deal in diamonds  and gold, or who are part of hawala cash-moving systems. According to a research paper published by the International Monetary Fund, hawala systems are an informal channel for moving funds from one location to another – often from one country to another. 

The experts agree that, while the international syndicates certainly showed the locals the ropes, many cash-in-transit robbers had turned to kidnappings, because it is far easier to pull off with less risk. Kidnapping an unarmed and unsuspecting business man requires fewer people, no bombs and the chances of a shootout with heavily armed police is reduced – if  they take precautions.  

“An array of groups with varying modus operandi are involved in the crime, ranging from small-scale syndicates targeting people in vulnerable communities and seeking quick money in relatively minor amounts to professional ‘mega-syndicates’ carefully targeting high net-worth individuals, sometimes holding victims for months at a time. Methods of  payment often reflect the sophistication and ambition of these actors: cash is convenient for a quick turn around and relatively small sums, but when amounts  demanded reach into tens of millions, access to cash is often unfeasible,” GI-TOC notes.  

Cryptocurrency has been demanded, as well as payments through hawala systems.  

The methods and make-up of the syndicates involved are as varied as the victims. The cases that most often make it into the newspapers are usually because of the profile of the victims and the high ransom demands.  

The most-cited case considered the first kidnapping of a wealthy Muslim businessman is that of Naushad Deshmukh Khan, who was taken from outside his clothing shop in Athlone, Cape Town, in November 2016. 

Reports speculated at the time that his family had received a £20-million (approximately R480-million today) ransom demand, but he was released in late December that same year, with no indication how much, if any ransom, was paid.

In May 2019, Sandra Munsamy – of the X-Moor tanker business mentioned earlier in these pages – was kidnapped in Durban, and kept in a nondescript house in eMalahleni (Witbank) in Mpumalanga for 162 days. Her brother previously told the court, during the trial of her kidnappers that was still ongoing as of mid-2025, that he had negotiated the initial demand for $10-million. While many reports indicate that it was ultimately paid, this remains unclear, as she was eventually rescued by the police and her captors arrested. 

Of the four men arrested and on trial, two are Mozambican nationals.  

In 2021, four nephews of wealthy businessman Zunaid Moti were kidnapped in Polokwane. It has been reported that R50-million was paid for their safe return, although the family denied it. The boys – aged  seven to 15 at the time – were dropped by the side of the road about three weeks after they were taken.

Around the same time, Jahyr Abdula, the son of Mozambican telecommunications executive Salimo Abdula, was kidnapped while driving from Maputo to Johannesburg in October 2021. He was pulled over by a car with blue lights and sirens and grabbed, along with a friend. The friend was rescued the same day by police, but Jahyr was held for a month and a demand of $10-million was made.  

He was rescued a month later, and one man was arrested.

In 2025, another man – believed to be a master mind behind a spate of high-profile kidnappings – was arrested. He remains in custody and will soon go on trial.

The man escaped from the Pretoria Magistrate’s Court while appearing for a 2022 kidnapping case, before he could be charged with another kidnapping.  

Notably, the 2022 case involved the kidnapping of Yaseen Bhiko, and he was due to be charged with the kidnapping of Bhiko’s son Muhammad in early 2025.

This man, who can’t be named because he hasn’t pleaded yet, is believed to have been at the head of a major kidnapping syndicate that specifically targeted Muslim businessmen. 

There are dozens of cases like this, and the families are always wary to confirm the payment of a ransom, in case they are targeted again.  

Another phenomenon is the kidnapping of groups of immigrants who are smuggled into the country, notably Bangladeshi and Ethiopian groups.  

In May 2025, police rescued 44 young Ethiopian men from a house in Sandton. They were being held there while demands were made to their families to pay for their release.

It was the third such incident in a few months. But it’s not only high net-worth individuals who are targeted. Other types of kidnapping are becoming more prevalent, especially “express kidnappings”. “Another trend we find, which is very prevalent right now, is that a hijacking is then turned into a kidnapping. People who would hijack you would then ask for your cellphone and they get you to forcefully open your app. You go into your banking  app, and they see the amount of money that you have available on your banking app,” Khan explained in 2023. 

Then you are forced to make money transfers, or your family is asked to deposit more cash, and this, too, is taken. 

In some cases, hijacking victims are driven to a series of ATM machines and forced to withdraw cash. The big kidnappings require muscle, cash and  organisation. The other types of extortion and kidnappings are, however, far more prevalent, and may happen on the spur of the moment.  

High-net-worth individuals and those with jobs that could make them a target, have been urged to get kidnap and ransom insurance. But for thousands of  South Africans, that is not a luxury they can afford.  

“We also have people that live in the townships, people that live in informal settlements that are kidnapped, and for very small amounts of ransom. A  fine example is if you live in a township set-up or an informal settlement and you got a promotion at your job and they give you a new company vehicle, you can be rest assured within a few days there’s a knock on your door from gangsters or would-be potential kidnappers and they will demand protection fees from you to prevent you from having your goods  stolen or the vehicle taken or your children taken in exchange for ransom amounts,” Khan said.

GI-TOC drew a further, more worrying conclusion in its 2022 report. 

“Many analysts believe that the lower-income demographic is at heightened risk [of kidnapping  for ransom or extortion, KRE], with many more instances of express kidnappings than big kidnappings for ransom. Yet these low-level KRE cases are likely to remain in the shadows, given that they are rarely reported due to mistrust of the police, who are often  associated with the crime. This risks creating a data gap that diminishes understanding of the scale and severity of the problem and prevents appropriate resources from being allocated.” 

In other words, hundreds if not thousands of incidents could be going unreported – meaning the already sky-high official SAPS statistics are an  undercount. 

This, ultimately, presents a significant challenge for police – not just in investigative terms but also in terms of trust.  

No police force in the world that is so heavily compromised at nearly every level can expect to fight a crime that so many perceive they are involved in.  

“The statistics are scary. I’m not going to candy coat that. We live in challenging times. I think if we’re expecting the state or other people to do  something to protect our businesses, to protect our families and ourselves, then we need to relook at that. I think we need to start doing things for  ourselves, for our company and our communities,” Khan said in 2023. 

Since then, kidnappings have continued nearly unabated. And, as Khan points out, relying on the South African Police Service and the government to prevent this is a fool’s errand.  

“It is a frightening prospect, amid the rise in nearly every type of serious crime and particularly murder and rape, that South Africans must continue to prepare for yet another risk: that one of the people they love most could be snatched as they drop them off at school or when they arrive at work reported due to mistrust of the police, who are often associated with the crime. This risks creating a data gap that diminishes understanding of the scale and severity of the problem and prevents appropriate resources from being allocated.” 

In February 2025, police minister Senzo Mchunu pointed a finger at lax immigration controls and porous borders. He was speaking in the wake of arrests of Pakistani, Zimbabwean and Mozambican nationals in the Eastern Cape for the kidnapping of a nine-year-old girl.

The evidence shows he is not wrong. But the evidence also shows that government will have to focus on cleaning up corruption within police ranks before anything else.  

Wolves in sheep’s clothing are unlikely to keep the flock safe. DM

Mafia Land, Inside South Africa’s Darkest Cartels, is published by Penguin Random House. Two-time winner of the prestigious Taco Kuiper Award, Kyle Cowan is one of South Africa’s most acclaimed investigative journalists. His fearless exposés of corruption at the highest levels of power have earned him many other journalistic accolades. He is also the author of Sabotage: Eskom Under Siege. Mafia Land is his second book.