SAPS ballistics backlog imperils criminal cases and undermines trust in police

Testifying before the Madlanga Commission on Monday, 27 October, Brigadier Mishak Mkhabela, the head of the ballistics section at the Forensic Science Laboratory in Silverton, Pretoria, said the unit had a backlog of 41,846 criminal cases, was crippled by staff shortages and mired in delays that jeopardised firearm investigations countrywide.

Mkhabela said 21,732 of the cases were from 2025 alone, reflecting a deepening backlog that results in cases being thrown out of court for lack of evidence and undermines trust in the criminal justice system.

The commission, investigating allegations of corruption within the police service and the judiciary, heard that the Western Cape was the hardest hit province, with ballistic evidence in more than 5,000 cases still awaiting analysis. In the Eastern Cape, such evidence in more than 2,500 cases remains untested, while in KwaZulu-Natal, the backlog is over 3,700 cases. Some of these cases date back to 2022.

Mkhabela said that more than 29,000 firearms linked to criminal investigations were in police storage. He attributed the massive backlog to severe staff shortages and other operational challenges within SAPS forensic laboratories.

His evidence revealed that because of these staff constraints, it took police more than a year to link five firearms to nearly 30 serious crimes, including more than 20 murders, two attempted murders, and four cash-in-transit robberies.

Experts and civil society groups said the backlog was evidence of deep, systemic failures within the SAPS that eroded public trust and deepened the pain of those already shattered by violent crime.

The importance of ballistic testing in linking firearms to multiple crimes was underscored by a diagram presented to the commission, which linked the firearms used in the murders of Vereeniging engineer Armand Swart, Oupa “DJ Sumbody” Sefoka, and Hector “DJ Vintos” Buthelezi to more than 20 other criminal cases.

Swart was shot 23 times outside the office of his employer, the boiler manufacturer Q-Tech, on 17 April 2024 in what appears to have been a case of mistaken identity. Four guns were used in the shooting: an AK-47 assault rifle, a 9mm Taurus pistol, a CZ pistol and a Sig Sauer 9mm pistol.

On Tuesday, 28 October, senior forensic analyst Captain Solomon Modisane, attached to the Political Killings Task Team (PKTT), told the commission that the AK-47 rifle found in the possession of two suspects charged with murdering Swart, Katiso “KT” Molefe and Warrant Officer Pule Tau, had been used to murder DJ Sumbody, DJ Vintos and Don Tindleni.

Read more: Armand Swart killing suspect, KT Molefe’s nephew, on the run since 2024

DNA testing backlog

Earlier this year, the chairperson of the Portfolio Committee on Police, Ian Cameron, received information that the SAPS Forensic Science Laboratory faced yet another crisis, with the DNA testing backlog exceeding 140,000 cases.

Cameron, the DA’s deputy spokesperson on police, this week said the party would push for a forensic overhaul of the SAPS, backed by independent oversight and accountability, to restore professionalism and public trust in policing.

“This action is urgent given the shocking evidence before the Madlanga Commission, which exposed a national crisis in SAPS’s forensic and ballistic systems,” he said.

Cameron noted that the guns used in Swart’s murder were later linked to at least 20 other killings, yet the initial SAPS ballistic report on these weapons contained multiple factual errors, missing analyses and even incorrect case numbers.

“The national head of ballistics, Brigadier Mishak Mkhabela, admitted the original report was ‘error-riddled’ and had to be rewritten several times by the same analyst, Captain Itumeleng Makgotloe, whose mistakes were defended as ‘typos’. Pages were replaced, affidavits resubmitted, and at least three versions of the same report were filed, all before critical evidence was verified,” he added.

He added that, even more disturbingly, the Madlanga Commission evidence leader, advocate Matthew Chaskalson SC, revealed that Makgotloe appeared to know about the guns’ links to other murders months before the Swart case was logged on the Integrated Ballistics Identification System, raising concerns that organised crime networks within or connected to the SAPS may have accessed or influenced forensic data.

“Such conduct reflects more than incompetence; it signals systemic corruption and manipulation of evidence at the heart of SAPS’s crime intelligence and forensic functions,” said Cameron.

Court proceedings hampered

Criminologist Dr Guy Lamb, a lecturer at Stellenbosch University, told Daily Maverick that the testimony before the Madlanga Commission pointed to deep, systemic problems within the police.

He said unprocessed ballistic and DNA evidence created “a massive bottleneck in the sense that court proceedings cannot proceed without that evidence and cases are dismissed or thrown out of the court”, and as a result, the conviction rate in firearm-related cases in South Africa was very low.

“At the Madlanga Commission, we’re talking about the urgent need to provide proper funding for the Political Killings Task Team, which makes up only a small component of the police and deals with a limited number of cases.

“Yet one of the biggest crime challenges in South Africa involves firearm-related offences, murders, attempted murders, robberies with aggravating circumstances and hijackings, across all provinces.”

Read more: Crime stats — Cape Town remains among SA’s deadliest cities despite dip in murders

Lamb said ballistic testing, in theory, should strengthen the criminal justice system and help secure convictions. In reality, however, it failed to do so, being hindered by having too few specialists and insufficient capacity to process evidence within a reasonable timeframe.

“The bottom line is that this is a serious firearm weakness in the criminal justice system, and it undermines all the good work that police do in investigating firearms crimes and seizing firearms.”

Dr Simon Howell, a senior research fellow at the University of Cape Town’s Centre of Criminology, said the backlog was an ongoing problem within the entire national forensic system and, in particular, in KZN.

“The backlog is a major concern for South Africa as a whole, and it fundamentally undermines trust in and the legitimacy of the criminal justice system. It also creates serious operational problems. Investigators are sitting with millions of dockets on their desks that they can’t finalise because of the forensic backlog,” said Howell.

Justice denied

Claire Taylor of Gun Free South Africa (GFSA) said that without timely ballistic analysis, it was impossible to identify patterns linking guns to crimes, evidence that was crucial for prosecutions and to curb SA’s gun violence crisis.

She said the Western Cape’s 5,000-plus outstanding analyses were especially concerning, given the province’s central role in GFSA’s Prinsloo Guns class action against the minister of police.

In 2016, former SAPS colonel Chris Lodewyk Prinsloo and a colleague were found guilty of selling an estimated R9-million worth of illegal weapons and ammunition to Cape Flats gang bosses and right-wing extremists in Gauteng.

The backlog, said Taylor, “means we will most likely never fully understand the damage from this single instance of police corruption, let alone broader firearms leakage, which in turn impacts our ability to deliver justice to victims and their families, let alone address systemic failures in firearms management, including the record-keeping failures that allowed this corruption to go unchecked.”

These failures, she said, included the Waymark Infotech tender of 2004, a project meant to create a firearm record-keeping system capable of tracking every gun from “cradle to grave” and preventing leakage from the legal to illegal market.

Awarded under questionable circumstances, the contract cost taxpayers R412-million, ballooning from an initial R42-million, yet still failed to deliver a working system.

Mismanaged system

Kaylynn Palm, the head of Action Society’s Action Centre in the Western Cape, said the crisis in the SAPS ballistics division laid bare the extent to which South Africa’s entire forensic system was failing.

“Behind every number is a victim and a family living in uncertainty. Parents who cannot bury their children with closure, survivors who are forced to relive trauma each time a case is postponed, and families who sit through court appearances that end in yet another delay.

Palm said the DNA testing backlog was even more severe and crippled rape and murder investigations. Both crises stemmed from the same root cause: a centralised and mismanaged system that had lost capacity and credibility.

She cited the trial of Stephan Pretorius, accused of murdering his wife, Charlene Pretorius, in May 2023, as an example. The case was postponed in the Gauteng High Court in Pretoria on 20 October, after the defence argued it could not proceed without the outstanding toxicology report.

Siya Monakali, the spokesperson for Ilitha Labantu, a non-profit organisation that works to combat violence against women and children, said the ballistics testing backlog had a profound impact on gender-based violence cases, especially where firearms were used as tools of intimidation, control or violence.

Survivors, he noted, were left in limbo as investigations stalled, while families of victims were denied closure by delayed forensic results. DM