10 professionals assassinated in three years, zero masterminds arrested

On 30 March 2026, 39-year-old Emfuleni municipality finance official Martha Rantsofu was shot dead while waiting for her car outside a tyre shop just metres from a police station in Vanderbijlpark.

Widely circulated CCTV footage shows Rantsofu being approached from behind and shot multiple times. The Political Killings Task Team (PKTT) is now investigating the murder.

Emfuleni spokesperson Makhosonke Sangweni was quick to deny claims that Rantsofu was a whistleblower, but Vaal Business Corporation CEO Klippies Kritzinger told News24 that she had alerted him to fraudulent payments, procurement irregularities and missing municipal funds she had uncovered.

Rantsofu’s killing is the latest in a series of targeted attacks on professionals across SA, including lawyers, prosecutors and auditors. In case after case, the masterminds who commission these killings remain elusive, evading accountability and continuing to act with apparent impunity.

Daily Maverick has found that over the past three years, at least 10 professionals have been murdered, with motives suspected to be linked to their work, without any masterminds being arrested, despite the alleged gunmen being charged in some cases.

A pattern across professions

Rantsofu’s murder follows a string of attacks on professionals whose work placed them at the centre of high-stakes legal, financial or political disputes. In 2021, Gauteng Department of Health finance head Babita Deokaran was assassinated after flagging the billions being looted from Tembisa Hospital. The masterminds behind her killing are still at large.

Fears that such cases are becoming more frequent have intensified since the 2023 killing of insolvency practitioner Cloete Murray and his son Thomas, after which similar attacks have continued to surface.

Insolvency attorney Bouwer van Niekerk had warned that the killings of Cloete Murray and his son sent a “terrifying message” and showed an “omnipresent threat by malevolent criminals who display a shocking ambivalence toward human life”.

Three years later, his mother Amy van Niekerk now waits for answers as she mourns a son killed in the same calculated manner.

“I told the [investigating officer] that I don’t just want the hitmen to be brought to justice, but also the mastermind,” said Amy, who has since taken it upon herself to follow up on the investigation, shielding other family members from updates she fears may deepen their distress.

“Quite a number of times, I haven’t even told my husband and my sons what has been communicated to me… I know they’d become so despondent, but I still have to carry it with me,” she told Daily Maverick.

According to analysts at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime, those working in professions tied to financial flows may be particularly vulnerable, as their work threatens illicit profit networks. Senior analyst at the initiative, Michael McLaggan, said protection of profit was the main motivation for murder in many of these cases.

“These are criminal actors with a lot to lose, so they will use murder as a means to protect themselves… Those disrupting illicit finance bear the greatest risk,” he said.

The initiative’s East Africa head, Rumbi Matamba, added that in some cases “it is easier and quicker to find and commission a hitman than to go through formal legal processes, in cases of business disputes, for example”.

Consistent methods

Certain patterns recur across these cases. These brazen executions are typically carried out in public or semi-public spaces, with no regard for bystanders or witnesses, such as in the case of prosecutor Tracy Brown, who was killed in front of her minor child. Usually, nothing is taken during these shootings, pointing away from opportunistic crime and toward targeted hits.

In several cases, there are indications of prior surveillance, coordinated escape plans, and access to insider information. Yet despite this apparent level of organisation, investigations rarely lead to those who commissioned the killings.

According to Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime analysts, these cases form part of a much broader landscape of contract killings in SA.

“Not a day goes by without an assassination in SA,” Matamba said.

Their research suggests that assassinations are not increasing in number, but rather that some receive greater public attention, especially when victims are professionals or public figures, rather than those linked to taxi violence, for instance, which still accounts for a significant portion of hits.

A central feature of these killings is the distance between those who order them and those who carry them out.

“High-profile assassinations are complex and multi-layered; often, the hitmen themselves don’t know who the mastermind is,” Matamba said.

McLaggan added that intermediaries, informal payment systems, and a lack of paper trails make it difficult for investigators to trace responsibility. As a result, arrests are often limited to gunmen, drivers or facilitators, rather than those who benefit.

Accountability barriers

Experts point to a combination of factors that make prosecuting masterminds particularly difficult. These include limited investigative capacity – especially in financial tracing – and, in some instances, compromised officials within the criminal justice system.

“Sometimes, if you look at persons arrested for hits, you see that they have a law enforcement or military background. Where law enforcement is compromised, there are going to be efforts to sabotage investigations,” McLaggan told Daily Maverick.

The deterrent effect of these killings also plays a role. Successful assassinations can silence not only the immediate victim, but also potential witnesses or others working in similar fields.

Matamba said that greater investments and intelligence capacity were needed to identify those behind such crimes.

“The information is out there, as journalists have consistently shown. And not everyone in the system is corrupt; building the capacity of and supporting state institutions which show integrity in their work would also have a positive impact.”

McLaggan added that passing the Whistleblower’s Protection Bill would be a positive step toward successfully and more consistently prosecuting those who commission killings.

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In a statement on Wednesday responding to Rantsofu’s murder, Business Against Crime South Africa (Bacsa) said, “This follows a deeply troubling pattern: individuals who act in the public interest, particularly whistle-blowers, are increasingly exposed to intimidation and, in some cases, targeted violence.”

“Much of what South Africa knows about state capture came from insiders who took enormous personal risks. The country has learned that lesson — now it must act on it.”

Bacsa said legislative steps to protect whistle-blowers were important, but those weren’t enough.

“If individuals exposing corruption can be silenced without consequence, the entire system is weakened. South Africa cannot afford a system where accountability triggers violence, and violence goes unpunished.”

Left without answers

Six weeks after Bouwer van Niekerk’s murder, his mother said the police had still not contacted the family.

In that time, the family made repeated attempts to push for progress. His godmother, Ruda Landman, wrote an open letter to acting Police Minister Firoz Cachalia, while Amy van Niekerk eventually managed to reach her son’s investigating officer through the executor of his estate.

“I’d just like to know, is there an investigation going on at all or not?” she recalled asking Lieutenant-General Hilda Senthumule during their first phone call.

The Acting Deputy National Commissioner for Crime Detection later visited the family in person. While Amy described her as “sweet” and “apologetic”, the visit did little to reassure her. “She came with her whole entourage. But to be quite honest, it felt like a PR exercise,” she said.

Soon after, one of Gauteng’s top cops, Major-General Mbuso Khumalo, contacted the family, stating that the case had been transferred to him. He took statements from the family, including details of threatening messages Bouwer had received a week before his murder.

His thoroughness gave her a sense of hope for the first time since her son’s death.

Shortly after the murder, she lit a candle in her son’s memory, determined to keep it burning until those responsible were held accountable. But she admits that sustaining that hope has been difficult.

“I’ve said that I’d keep the candle burning, but then, at the beginning of this year… I decided I’m giving up hope,” she said. “As a mother, I think that's the hardest part – to come to terms with it yourself, to say, okay, although we’d like to see justice being done, you must perhaps accept that it’s not going to happen.”

At the time of writing, the SAPS had not answered Daily Maverick’s questions regarding the pattern of assassinations, as well as on progress in specific cases. DM