Former policeman and illegal cellphone tracking system salesman Bradley Goldblatt stated that as soon as he realised the late Anti-Gang Unit detective Charl Kinnear was in danger, he alerted a contact at the State Security Agency.
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However, the woman he spoke to referred him to the Hawks’ Crime Against the State unit, but he struggled to get anyone to answer their phones.
Eventually, he reached a warrant officer, Wynand Olivier, in the unit, and informed him of the situation. Despite his repeated warnings, Kinnear was shot dead, and the SSA officer later called him, crying.
Goldblatt was testifying in the Western Cape High Court trial of Nafiz Modack and 14 others, including Zane Kilian, the alleged prolific tracker of Kinnear and others.
The excessive tracking, without a warrant signed by a judge and using MTN and Vodacom’s databases for cellphone tower records, had made Goldblatt uneasy.
He testified that the last time a client had excessively pinged a phone, a woman’s lover was beaten up by her angry husband, who used the tracking information to find them at their rendezvous.
Kilian is accused of illegal location tracking and communications interception for Modack’s alleged criminal racketeering enterprise.
Like his co-accused, he has pleaded not guilty to all charges. He claims that someone else was also using the credentials he used for vehicle repossessions and denies making that many pings.
He stated that his pinging of Kinnear was done for Modack, who claimed it was for ‘an embarrassing vehicle repossession’ aimed at Kinnear, whom Modack loathed, and to monitor when Kinnear was heading to Modack’s house in Plattekloof for a raid. However, when arrested, Kilian initially claimed it was for a ‘Mohammed’ before finally admitting the truth.
Goldblatt testified that he provided Kilian with a unique username and password for pinging and sold him his own credentials to access a credit records company. The credit record access through the company MarisIT cost R5 000 for 1 000 searches, and his company, iTrack Solutions, sold Kilian bundles of 50 pings for R2 100 using platform developer Larry Hurwitz’s company 3DT’s LAD interface software.
Kilian said he required the pings and credit record access for vehicle repossessions for Standard Bank.
The credit records provided personal details such as addresses, car registration numbers, phone numbers, and a photo of a target’s ID card. Combining this information with the pinging data, a tracer could establish a pattern of a target’s real-time movements, know their appearance, and what vehicle they drove. If a street or complex unit number was unavailable, the tracer could plot movement patterns over time and wait for the target to arrive at one of these locations.
Goldblatt stated that in late August and early September 2020, an internal alert system revealed that Kilian was frequently pinging three numbers: Kinnear’s, lawyer William Booth’s, and Kinnear’s colleague, Leticia van der Horst’s.
Booth narrowly escaped a hit in April of that year while representing a client being pursued for debt collection by Modack and his co-accused, Jacques Cronje. Goldblatt monitored this for a while, then contacted his SSA contact to report all the pings targeting Kinnear. She provided him with contacts from the Hawks’ Crime Against the State Unit (CATS). Despite his efforts, none of them answered or returned his calls, but he eventually reached Warrant Officer Wynand Olivier in CATS and briefed him at a shopping centre. Olivier advised leaving it to the police and, in follow-ups, assured him that Kinnear’s boss, former AGU head Andre Lincoln, had said a task team was protecting Kinnear.
Olivier is expected to testify to confirm or refute this, but after Kinnear’s murder, Olivier escalated the tip within a day of being briefed by Goldblatt, yet only a highway patrol was sent to monitor Kinnear’s street.
Goldblatt mentioned that he called Olivier every day out of concern and was limiting Kilian’s pings while police monitored him.
Prosecutor Greg Wolmarans displayed WhatsApp messages from Kilian to Goldblatt on a screen to demonstrate how desperate Kilian was for more pings leading up to Kinnear’s assassination on 18 September 2020.
Goldblatt stated that in the two days leading up to Kinnear’s murder, the police were not returning his calls. The first ping to Kinnear’s phone on the day he was killed went through at 2:42am, followed by repeated pinging throughout the day.
The last ping occurred at 3:25pm, after Kinnear was shot dead shortly after 3pm. The pinging ceased immediately afterward.
Kinnear’s primary phone had been pinged 2 408 times, his second phone eight times, and his third phone 21 times.
Goldblatt said he was sitting by his pool that Friday when the SSA woman he had first reported the pinging to called him.
He said, ‘She was crying on the phone and said I must look on News24, which I did. So obviously I just put five and five together,’ he said.
Goldblatt tried to call Olivier but couldn’t reach him. He called back the following day.
‘There was lots of swearing — from both sides.’
The weekend was ‘a blur,’ and on Sunday, 20 September, Kilian called him from an unfamiliar number. Kilian allegedly asked him to scrub him from the system, ‘as though he was never there.’
‘He said he had already deleted his phones and cleared his things, and I needed to do it now.’
Goldblatt did not comply with Kilian’s request.
It was only on 21 September that the police served Goldblatt with a subpoena for all his records.
‘They weren’t doing anything even though I was calling every day.’
‘I didn’t feel safe considering I gave the police two weeks’ notice [of Kinnear being pinged] when I knew in my heart it was going to happen.’
Goldblatt’s fears came true when a gunman fired shots at his bakkie, his wall, and his lounge window.
According to News24, neither a task team nor protectors had been assigned to keep Kinnear safe, despite the repeated warnings.
MTN and Vodacom also cut access to their databases for Goldblatt and the pinging platform’s developer, Larry Hurwitz, who had sold access to the service to Goldblatt.
Goldblatt’s company has since been liquidated, and Hurwitz claims he no longer owns the platform.
Goldblatt will resume his testimony on Monday and will be cross-examined once the State finishes leading evidence.
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Picture: Theo Jeptha / Gallo Images
