On Friday, Rapper Kiernan “AKA” Forbes and his close friend Tebello “Tibz” Motsoane were killed, and a team of KwaZulu-Natal detectives are sifting through hundreds of hours of video footage, speaking with dozens of people, and scouring social media for any and all clues that could help them apprehend the killers.
Lt-Gen Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi, the commissioner of the KwaZulu-Natal Provincial Police, said on Newzroom Afrika that detectives were following the hitmen’s travels backward in an effort to identify the murderers.
He believes the main target of the attack was AKA, and his companion Motsoane was hit in the crossfire.
“Our strategy is to trace the incident from the shooting backward. How those people got to the spot (of the crime scene), what was their communication and what were their movements?
“The investigation that we are rolling out and the strategy we are employing is that we are tracing it back .., from the shooting backward, as to how those people get called to that spot from the first place and everything else that involves their communication, their movements, and so forth,” he said.
Detectives are sifting through a vast quantity of data, according to Mkhwanazi, to piece together the circumstances leading up to and following the incident.
“We are still analyzing quite a number of data that we collected, including video footage, cellphone data, communication, social media communications, as I’m sure it’s public knowledge that one of the deceased was communicating all his movements before him going to the place so anyone who would have access to (those social media platforms) would have known exactly where he was going to be at any given time,” he said.
Mkhwanazi asserted that he had no doubts. The killing of AKA was a “contract killing.”