Over 11 000 people have put down their signatures in a petition calling for justice for rapper Kiernan 'AKA' Forbes who was gunned down with celebrity chef and businessman Tebello “Tibz” Matsoane by two unknown hitmen. The two men were killed during an embrace outside of a restaurant on Florida Road after AKA had been enjoying dinner with friends and was preparing to go to a concert at a nightclub.
COLLECTING SIGNATURE
The petition was started by a woman known as Lelo N directing it to the SAPS Lieutenant General Sehlahle Fannie Masemola, Lieutenant General Nhlanhla Mkwanazi in KwaZulu-Natal, and Advocate Shamila Batohi. In the petition, Lelo N questions that If a well-known and celebrated person like AKA could be so carelessly assassinated in front of a police kiosk stationed off Florida road and the public, what chance do ordinary citizens have? “I am starting this petition in the hopes that there are more South Africans, who are tired of unsolved murders; tired of living in a murder capital, where the police work hand in hand with the criminals,” she says.
LOSING A LOVED ONE
Lelo N says, like AKA, her father was also killed by inkabi. “Just like Kairo Forbes (AKA’s daughter), saw her father as her hero, I saw my father as mine. One day a hitman walked into a house with six witnesses, went straight to my father, and shot him in the neck,” she says. “Unlike AKA, my father had to go through the excruciating pain of knowing what was happening to him. Bleeding, and perhaps losing air, he tried to flee to one of the other rooms in the house, as the hitmen followed him. He shot through the door of one of the rooms that my father had run into when trying to call an unresponsive emergency number.” Lelo says the hitmen went in and shot, hitting him with another bullet in his hand as God knows how was trying to fight the hitman off. “My father finally succumbed to weakness from blood loss. As he dropped to the ground he was shot three more times. The next time I saw my father he was in a hospital ER with blood dripping from his neck and bullets through his body,” she says. “Although my father survived but became a quadriplegic and three years later succumbed to renal failure. He died a very sad man who never knew justice. Despite suspects being provided to the police with motivating statements. All we were left with was the sad memory of his last 3 years, a young single mom of 3 young children (my widowed mother), and the case number of another South African cold case.”
SENSELESS KILLINGS
Lelo N says, it is enough with the senseless killings. “How many more of our siblings, fathers, and mothers need to die senselessly before perpetrators are brought to book? Is it your father, your uncle, or maybe your brother or your son next? Will he be going to the local supermarket to buy a loaf of bread and then gunned down?
