Sunday, September 11, 2011

A former top South African policeman has been sentenced to seven years in prison for drink-driving and defeating the ends of justice

A magistrate said that Robert McBride, the ex-chief of a local police force near Johannesburg, was evil. He was convicted of crashing a state-owned car in 2006 while drunk. McBride was a famous anti-apartheid fighter who was once on death row for bombing a bar in the eastern port city of Durban in 1986. Pretoria Magistrate Peet Johnson said that McBride had not shown any remorse for causing the accident. The charge sheet said that McBride had asked a doctor to draw blood from a subordinate after the crash and then tried to obtain a false medical certificate stating he was sober at the time of the accident. The crash happened outside Pretoria after McBride attended a Christmas party in 2006. At the time, he was the head of the metro police force in the Ekurhuleni region, near Johannesburg. Johnson jailed McBride - a prominent member of the governing African National Congress (ANC) party - for two years for drunk driving and five years for defeating the ends of justice. Two years of the second term were suspended. In 2010, South Africa's ex-police chief, Jackie Selebi, was convicted of taking bribes from a drug dealer, Glenn Agliotti. During white-minority rule, McBride was given the death sentence for bombing a Durban beach-front bar, frequented by officers of the former apartheid regime. Three people were killed in the blast. The anti-apartheid movement led an international campaign to force the regime to grant McBride a reprieve. After the ANC came to power in 1994, ending apartheid, McBride was given a top post in the foreign affairs ministry.

1 comment:

AnalogMan said...

That slime MacBride was never in any sense an anti-apartheid fighter. The only time those vermin ever actually fought anyone was when the SA Defence Force took the fight to them in their bases in neighbouring countries - and invariably kicked their butts. MacBride was never in one of those camps. Planting a bomb in a bar is not "fighting". He's scum.

He was never a policeman, he's just a gangster with a badge. The fact that he was appointed Police Commissioner, with no relevant (or other) qualification, is an indication of the depths of moral degradation of the new SA government (so-called).

Politicians - at least ANC politicians - don't actually serve jail time in SA. He will spend a few weeks in the politicians' rest home (laughingly called a prison)in Malmesbury in the Western Cape, then will be diagnosed with high blood pressure or a hangnail, and released to hospital, then quietly released from there.