Bystander gunned down during high speed chase: VIDEO

Nkululeko Msibi was walking towards the gates of Tjeka Training Matters in Chamdor, Kagiso, while chatting to a friend on the phone.

It was the carpentry student's first day back at school after three months of in-service training. In 29 days he would be graduating.

As he punched the key pads on his phone, he was not aware of the two Flying Squad vehicles, an anti-hijacking vehicle and a Kagiso police station van, travelling westwards at high speed behind him. The police cars were pursuing a stolen silver Mercedes-Benz.

The two men in the Mercedes, stolen in Randfontein during a house robbery, started shooting at their pursuers, who returned fire.

As the gun war continued on Jacobs Street – a main road that divides Kagiso and Chamdor, where the training college is situated – the Mercedes lost control and veered towards a minibus taxi. The taxi driver swerved quickly out of its way.

Lebogang Mogapi, who is Msibi's schoolmate and who was inside the taxi, screamed.

A crowd, which included people going to work and schoolchildren, scattered all over the place once the shooting began. Others threw themselves on the ground and remained there.



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Two passers-by were shot, but survived the firefight.

Mogapi said she had looked out the taxi window after the shooting started and saw Msibi on his cellphone and about to walk into the school in Jacobs Street. Then she saw him fall, his phone landing some distance from him.

The police and the Mercedes continued along the street as Msibi lay dying. The police van then tried to take a corner quickly and overturned. One officer inside it was injured.

The other three police cars continued pursuing the Mercedes into Adcock Street towards Leratong Hospital. The police captured the two men because both the back wheels of their car were punctured and the car slowed down.

Provincial police spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel Lungelo Dlamini said the men had been part of a gang of five driving in a white Mazda who went to a house in Green Hills, Randfontein, around 7am.

They are alleged to have found a child outside waiting for his school transport.

"They held him at gunpoint and forced him inside the house. They also held the domestic worker at gunpoint and took R25 000, a TV, a computer, a cellphone and the Mercedes-Benz," he said.

The police and the tracking company found the car in Kagiso and started pursuing it. The Mazda with the stolen loot and the remaining three suspects got away.

Dlamini said they found a pistol inside the Mercedes, and the two men, aged 27 and 29, had been linked to two other crimes – a murder in Roodepoort and a house robbery in Brackendowns.