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WE applaud the police in Bulawayo for the swift manner in which they arrested nine men accused of raping two teachers and a woman at Luveve High School at the weekend. The suspects also stole household goods during their orgy of violence at the institution on Saturday night.

Police raided several properties — including one in Esigodini — between Saturday night and Monday in a dragnet which investigators believe could solve dozens of previous violent crimes, most of them committed in Cowdray Park high density suburb and surrounding areas.

One of the suspects was shot by homicide detectives while trying to escape on Sunday morning after he was cornered at a drinking spot in Four Winds suburb. Police sources said the suspect was shot in the leg as he tried to jump over a pre-cast wall to evade arrest and is in hospital under police guard.

The gang — aged between 21 and 37 years — has been linked to a spate of unlawful entry, theft, robbery and rape cases in Cowdray Park suburb and following their arrest, police recovered an assortment of property including 17 cellphones, laptops, decoders, generators, DVD players and plasma television sets.

In December, it is believed the same gang pounced on a Cowdray Park couple, smashing their vehicle windscreen with an axe which they also used to attack the man. They kidnapped the couple and gang-raped the woman in a bushy area, before stealing the pair’s cellphones. Two days later, a South Africa-based public transporter who was trying to evade a police roadblock was also attacked by the suspects who gang-raped one of the women in his vehicle and stole R19,000 from another passenger.

We contend that violent crime has no place in society and call on the law enforcement agents to continue clamping down hard on criminal elements bent on reaping where they did not sow. Bulawayo has of late witnessed an upsurge in armed robberies and other violent crimes and the trend is a serious cause for concern.

We have reported on these pages the terror unleashed by marauding gangs on hapless residents of some western suburbs — particularly Cowdray Park — and we feel it is time authorities took drastic measures to arrest the scourge. Granted, some of the lumpen elements terrorising residents of the sprawling suburb have been accounted for in the latest arrests but more needs to be done to bring down the crime rate in that area. While we accept the limitations of the Zimbabwe Republic Police in deploying enough details to patrol crime hotspots such as Cowdray Park, we feel the area now requires a police station of its own because clearly Luveve Police Station is stretched to the limit.

A concerted effort is required from community leaders who should work with the police in arresting crime which is spiralling out of control. Police work on the basis of intelligence supplied by residents and we feel it is time they did their part in assisting the law enforcement agents.

The Bulawayo City Council should also ensure that street lighting is improved so as to reduce the number of dark alleys where criminals could lurk.

The brazen manner with which the Luveve High School raiders carried out their sickening attacks on the teachers and 19-year-old woman shows that they have no conscience and should be consigned to jail.

It is in this vein that we call for deterrent sentences on perpetrators of such vile and violent crimes which often leave the victims traumatised and requiring years of counseling.

The brilliant work done by the police in bringing to book the nine suspects involved in the Luveve school raid should be complemented by the judiciary which should hand down stiff sentences to the criminals if they are found guilty.