Daily Sun (January 28 2014) - THE cops thought they had saved the nyaope addict from a terrible beating by putting him in the back of the police van. But as the cops cruised off the thief was stolen from the back of the vehicle.

THE COPS ARRIVED AT THE POLICE STATION TO FIND THE SUSPECTS HAD DISAPPEARED!

The suspected thief and two other men arrested during patrols were nowhere to be found!

Warrant Officer Happy Nape admitted the men never made it to the De Deur cop shop, south of Joburg.

"We are going to investigate how the suspects got away from the police van. We will talk to the policemen who were at the scene," said Nape.

On Sunday afternoon, people from Majazane, Grasmere caught a 23-year-old man who had allegedly broken into a shack and stolen a DVD player and a Navigator GPS unit.

When the young man, desperate for his next nyaope hit, started selling the stolen items, angry community members cornered him and started beating him. That's when the De Deur police arrived on the scene. They put the suspect into the back of the van with two suspects from a previous arrest.

But the community wasn't satisfied. They followed the slow moving police van and one of the community members opened the door.

The two unknown suspects, happy about their lucky escape, happily danced around on the back bumper of the van and then disappeared between the shacks. But the man who stole the DVD player wasn't so lucky. The people got hold of him and the beating continued.

They took him back to the shack and demanded that he fix the door of the shack before they released him. In the meantime, the cops drove back to the station, unaware that there was nobody in the back of the van.

A resident who didn't want to be named told Daily Sun people are forever breaking into their shacks.

"It's time we took charge of crime in our community and teach these nyaope boys a lesson," she said.

See the Daily Sun mobi site for more on this and other stories....

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