Rustenburg – Investigations into the murder of Lieutenant-General Charl Kinnear remains classified, the police watchdog the Independent Police Investigative Directorate (Ipid), said on Thursday.
Ipid said its investigation into the murder of the top cop was not available for public consumption.
“The report remains classified and Ipid will therefore not comment on the details of the report. Ipid had to classify the report to protect witnesses.
“It contains sensitive records relating to their personal information that cannot be made public,” said Ipid spokesperson Lizzy Suping said in a statement.
“Furthermore, all those implicated cannot be named until they have been charged criminally and departmentally.”
She said according to the Minimum Information Security Standards (MISS), the head of an institution has the authority to classify a document in terms of the different levels of classification, namely: restricted, confidential, secret or top secret.
“The executive director of Ipid also has the authority to regrade and declassify information/documents. Therefore, the report remains classified as top secret until such time that the executive authority determines otherwise,” Suping said.
She said the directorate did not contravene the classification procedure, despite not all the pages of the report being stamped “top secret”. “The matter is being rectified,” she said.
Cape Times reported on Wednesday, that the investigation report relating to the murder of Kinnear was not properly classified before it was submitted to Parliament’s portfolio committee on policing (PCP).
On Wednesday, the PCP heard that only the cover page of the report was stamped “top secret”, instead of the entire document.
The report implicated a number of police officers – from low to senior ranks in management – alleged to be colluding with gangsters in the Western Cape.
Kinnear was murdered on September 18, 2020 in his vehicle outside his home in Bishop Lavis, Cape Town. He was shot multiple times in the upper body.
He was the section commander for the Western Cape anti-gang unit.
IOL