"Former S. Africa police chief sentenced; Selebi given 15-year term for corruption" by Angus Shaw, Associated Press | August 4, 2010
JOHANNESBURG — A judge sentenced South Africa’s former national police chief to 15 years in prison on corruption charges yesterday, saying he was an embarrassment to the crime-plagued country and the police officers who had served under him.
Jackie Selebi, 60, was convicted in July after a nation beset by violent crime heard months of testimony about its top police official going on designer shopping sprees with a convicted drug smuggler.
The case against Selebi, a onetime president of Interpol, has been a chief exhibit in a national debate over whether corruption and political meddling are undermining South Africa’s fight against crime....
No wonder drugs are such a huge problem in this world.
Selebi, once an important official in the governing African National Congress party, had pleaded innocent. He said evidence was fabricated to support the charge he accepted money and gifts in exchange for meeting a drug smuggler’s business associates and tipping him off to investigations.
Selebi argued that he was targeted by enemies who wanted to punish him for his criticism of an elite crime-fighting unit. The unit was disbanded in 2008 after it tried to prosecute Jacob Zuma on corruption charges before Zuma went on to become South Africa’s president.
The judge, in delivering the verdict last month, said Selebi’s conspiracy theory had no basis.
Suleman Selebi, brother of the former police chief, insisted yesterday that Selebi was a “scapegoat’’ in a conspiracy to protect corrupt officials throughout the country....
The main opposition Democratic Alliance party described Selebi’s trial as one of the most controversial in South African history after obstacles were set to protect Selebi.
“We as a country are almost completely unfamiliar with the idea of a corrupt official, connected to the ANC, actually going to prison,’’ it said in a statement.
The Afriforum advocacy group said Selebi, the head of police from 2000 to 2008, was brought to justice by the now disbanded Scorpions elite unit.
“Selebi would probably not have been prosecuted if the investigation had been left to a unit that fell directly under his command,’’ said Nantes Kelder, head of the group’s community safety office.Nothing like stating the obvious.
Sort of like Israel investigating itself, isn't it?
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