VAALWATER – While Rhino poachers in recent months operating mainly from helicopters in the Waterberg area, the latest incident involved a heavily armed gang operating more like robbers than poachers when they killed two rhino in a hail of automatic rifle fire, on a private game farm near Vaalwater on Monday. One member of the police investigation team expressed the possibility that they are probably from Gauteng.
The death of the two rhinos brings the number of such poaching incidents to twenty in the Waterberg area this year.

One witness said that the gang, numbered between eight and nine men, resembled more a heist gang with their assault rifles, brazen attitude and their willingness to draw cold blood.

The incident took place between 14:00 and 15:00 on the farm Makoupan. Japie Mujadibodu, a worker on the farm was preparing to feed the rhinos and while walking out of the barn to the tractor, he was surrounded by armed men. “I didn’t think I was going to live,” said Mujadibodu.

The men tied him and his wife Maria up and told them to lie on the ground. They also reassured the two that they do not want to harm them and that they were only there to shoot the rhino. Two of the men stood over the husband and wife, while the rest of the gang drove the tractor and trailer into the enclosure.

Nonna, the one rhino cow, was semi tame. Every day she would make her way to the feed trailer when the tractor came into the enclosure. On Monday, as she approached the trailer, the poachers who took cover behind the tractor, opened fire. Meters away another female rhino, Mains, was also shot multiple times, with either R4 or R5 rifles. The third one, a rhino bull called Seun, escaped through a gate and was unharmed.

According to Sollie Potgieter, whose family owns the farm, said the two cows were like pets. “Especially Nonna, she would always be the first at the trailer. She was very tame. She was a darling,” said Potgieter.

On Tuesday a police forensics team was at the farm, and from what they found believe that the men fired at close range at the rhinos. All the casings were dented in the middle, a tell tale sign, said police, that the poachers had used full automatic rifle fire, to empty as many rounds into the two animals as possible. With the two rhinos dead they hacked off the horns, which are valued at at least half a million rand each, and fled. Police trackers, who arrived on the scene shortly after the incident tracked their spoor to a nearby dirt road, then lost it.

A neighboring farmer told police that he had spotted a BMW driving down the same road at high speed shortly after the incident.

On Tuesday police gathered the shells and slugs from the bodies of the rhinos. They hope ballistics will lead them to the killers. They suspect a gang so heavily armed probably would be using their fire power for other violent crimes such as robbery, and heists.

Bosveld Bulletin