A Cape Town police constable was jailed for five years, on multiple counts of defeating the ends of justice for failing to hand parcels of seized drugs to the police lab.
|||Cape Town – A police constable was jailed for five years on Monday, on multiple counts of defeating the ends of justice.
He was also given a five-year suspended prison sentence, for fraud.
Ashley Clint Munnijk, 38, a married father of two, appeared in the Specialised Commercial Crime Court in Bellville, before magistrate Sabrina Sonnenberg.
The case took the form of a plea bargain, negotiated by defence attorney T Dodgen with the prosecutor, senior State advocate Simon Leope.
The magistrate ordered that Munnik may be released from prison into house arrest, at the discretion of the prison authorities – but only after serving 40 months of the five years.
Munnik was the investigating offer in drug-related cases at the Bonteheuwel police station on the Cape Flats.
Between the months January to March last year, he had to hand in 10 parcels, variously containing the drugs heroin, mandrax and tik, at the forensic laboratory at Plattekloof in Cape Town’s northern suburbs, but failed to do so.
His failure caused the withdrawal of the 10 drug-related cases.
In another case, involving a suspect caught with 17 containers of tik, he was supposed to take the containers to the laboratory for forensic analysis, but only handed in five.
The prosecutor pointed out that Munnik had taken some of the drugs for his own personal use.
Munnik had also abused his position of trust, the prosecutor said.
He said the offences were made all the more serious by the fact that the offender was a police official.
Accoring to court papers, Munnik joined the police in the year 2008, and two years later started experimenting with drugs.
After years of denial, he had only recently admitted his addiction, he would attend the Ark New Jerusalem Restoration Centre for rehabilitation after his release from prison, the papers said.
African News Agency