Gangster State

Ngombane, who had been hit by at least two bullets, was rushed into
surgery. One of the bullets had pierced his aorta, so he was suffering
from profuse internal bleeding. The surgeons opened his chest to find
the source of the bleeding and to try to repair the damage, but it was
too late.
Ngombane was declared dead at around 21 : 30 , about an hour after
arriving at the hospital. He was thirty-nine years old. The cause of
death was given as ‘gunshots to the chest and stomach’ in the official
record.
Premier Beatrice Marshoff rushed to the hospital as soon as she heard
about the shooting, but her right-hand man was already dead by the
time she got there.
Soon after Ngombane was pronounced dead, the police arrived at the
hospital. ‘They interviewed me. They were quite forceful, so I asked
them if I should get a lawyer,’ said Nokwanda. When she returned
home, a second set of police officers came to talk to her. ‘It was a very
long night,’ she recalled.
The police were thorough in their questioning of the shocked widow,
but it would later dawn on Nokwanda that they had omitted to perform
some key tasks that were not only standard practice, but also crucial
for any murder investigation. ‘A contact in the police later told me that
the first thing cops have to do at a crime scene where somebody was
shot is test any potential suspects’ hands for gunpowder residue,’ she
told me. ‘The police never did this on me or on any of the others who
were at the house.’
A week later, Ngombane was buried in Bloemfontein. In front of
hundreds of mourners who had come to pay their last respects to the
slain official, Nokwanda said her husband’s murder was a hit linked to