Western Cape High Court Judge Mark Sher lashed out at having to trawl through 4 000 pages to decide the bail appeal of Nafiz Modack and two others, saying the magistrate who refused bail left him with little to work with.

A News24 report says Modack, Jacques Cronje and former Anti-Gang Unit (AGU) officer Ashley Tabisher appealed for bail in the Western Cape High Court last year, after being refused bail by the Blue Downs Regional Court.

They are part of a group of 15 people implicated in some way in the murder of AGU detective Charl Kinnear outside his house in September 2020, in a case which has expanded significantly into an alleged massive racketeering matter.

It includes an attempted hand grenade attack on Kinnear's home, the murder of Nici Heerschap, the father of a Hawks officer investigating Modack, the attempted murder of lawyer William Booth, and the alleged kidnap of a finance specialist who was forced to pay back a failed investment, with a retrieval ‘commission’ to Modack.

In the judgment, Sher criticised Blue Downs Magistrate Deon van der Spuy for giving him hardly anything to work on as to why he had refused bail.

And the News24 report says he called the four investigating officers' statements a ‘mishmash’ of lengthy extracts of cellphone audio transcripts, with cross-references to annexures. Sher said he was left to trawl through over 4 000 pages to judge the appeal.

‘The approach that was adopted by the magistrate is to be deprecated,’ he wrote. ‘It amounted to an abdication of his duty as a judicial officer to set out the evidence and his evaluation thereof, providing cogent and transparent reasons for his decision to refuse the granting of bail. Because of this, the judgment is wholly unhelpful for the appeals which I am required to adjudicate,’ wrote Sher.

In their affidavits, he said the officers should have set out a summation of the state's case, ‘in an ordered, comprehensible and chronological fashion’.

Nevertheless, after going through everything, and summarising some of the evidence, Sher found that the three ultimately had a case to answer – and it would not be safe to release them on bail.

‘In my view, given the evidence which was put before the magistrate, there is every likelihood that, were they to be released on bail, the appellants would commit one or more or all of the acts (listed) and their release on bail would jeopardise the function of the criminal justice system and would place the integrity of the “bail system” in question, and bring it in disrepute,’ wrote Sher.

He said that, by the time the bail proceedings took place, one of the witnesses and one of the investigating officers had already been threatened or intimidated, and the father of one of the officers investigating Modack was shot dead in his driveway in Melkbosstrand.

He said there was every reason to believe that Modack and his ‘enforcer’, Cronje, would intimidate witnesses.

Full News24 report