The Independent Police Investigative Directorate says that it has the authority to classify a murder probe, making its investigation into the murder of anti-gang unit detective Charl Kinnear, classified.
Parliament's police
committee was supposed to receive a presentation from Ipid on the high-profile
murder last month but members of parliament were told that the report was classified and implicated senior officers, and
briefing them could hamper the investigation.
MPs however said they were not
happy with Ipid's reasoning and wanted to the reason why the report was
classified, while Kinnear's widow said that the report had not always been
classified and its contents were discussed with her.
Kinnear was shot dead
outside his Bishop Lavis home in 2020 and there have no arrests yet made.
The Minimum Information
Security Standards, the head of an institution had the authority to classify a
document in terms of the different levels of classification, namely restricted,
confidential, secret or top secret
The Ipid reiterated that
it had to classify the report to protect witnesses as the document contained
sensitive records relating to their personal information that could not be made
public.
In its statement, the Ipid
added it would not comment on the details of the ort, in order to protect
witnesses.
“It contains sensitive
records relating to their personal information that cannot be made public.”
“Furthermore, all those
who are implicated cannot be named until they have been charged criminally and
departmentally,” the Ipid said.
By Lulama Klassen
No comments:
Post a Comment