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Exhibits are always kept very safely whether they are at court or a police station, far away from the prying eyes of the public.   

They constitute the basis on which all police investigations or trial of cases at the courts are built.  Without them cases collapse and suspects, even those who should have been convicted, are set free.

We are shocked that despite this well known fact — that exhibits must always be kept safe — we had a case at Plumtree Police Station of a mysterious disappearance of not an ordinary exhibit, but a very, very valuable one — an eye-popping 28,5kg of gold worth $970 000.  As we report elsewhere on these pages today, the theft was discovered on Wednesday at around 11AM by officers who were on duty.

Sources told us that the heist was discovered as officers were searching for two missing rifles that had been booked in the charge office.  When an officer went to check at the armoury for the missing rifles, he was surprised to find the armoury door not locked.

“When he proceeded to the armoury intending to open the armoury, he observed that there was a key inserted on the key hole of the armoury door.

Officers discovered that the door was not locked. One of the officers who had knowledge about the gold kept in the armoury as an exhibit proceeded to the bucket where the alleged gold weighing 28, 5297kg was kept wrapped in a khaki paper and discovered that the khaki paper was torn and the gold was missing . However, the khaki papers were left in the bucket,” said a source.

It is very curious that the gold, being kept as an exhibit at the station since September 2015, was taken from the police station’s armoury, a facility that must be the most closely guarded  at any police station.  Apart from housing the gold, among other exhibits, the armoury had guns as well, which makes the need for it to be guarded tightly doubly critical.  The Plumtree case is even more curious because the gold theft came to light when police were looking for two rifles that had gone missing.

Exhibits and guns seldom disappear from high security places as they did at Plumtree Police Station.  We will not prejudge anything at this early stage.

However, we are reasonable.  No outsider would be so courageous as to walk into a police station armoury, take away gold and leave unnoticed.  Also, we take note of the fact that there was no forcible access into the arsenal — the criminal actually used a key to unlock it and make good their escape.

Therefore, it is highly probable that this was an inside job.

With this in mind, it should be a bit easy for detectives to smoke out the thieves.  The investigators will need to focus on officers at the station whose duties include overseeing the security of the gun vault.  These would be the first suspects.  If they aren’t taken as suspects, they must be asked to explain why and how the keys to the safe that were in their custody disappeared to land into the wrong hands that then committed the crime on Wednesday.

Other officers at the station, not necessarily those who guard the armoury, will have to be interviewed as well.  This will have to include the local commanders.  They would be challenged to explain how this happened right under their watch.

At the time of writing it had not been clear if the two guns were still not accounted for, of course in addition to the gold.  If they have not been recovered yet, this presents yet another challenge — that the rifles may be in wrong hands which could use them to commit more and worse crimes.  That is why we say that this case deserves thorough investigations.

We are disturbed that the person who tried to smuggle the gold to Botswana was arrested almost three years ago.  The reason why the gold was still being kept at the police station suggests that investigations into the smuggling bid hadn’t been completed.  Why is this so, three years after the arrest?  Was this not part of a wider scheme by those responsible to delay investigations to then create circumstances favourable to the commission of the heist that they finally pulled off on Wednesday?