City Power security guards held hostage during cable theft
Two security guards of City Power are receiving counselling and medical attention after they were held hostage by criminals who stole cables at the Alexandra substation.
The brazen attack by six armed criminals happened on Tuesday night.
The theft and vandalism caused a widespread outage in the Alexandra area, affecting thousands of people.
City Power spokesperson Isaac Mangena says the suspects fled with stolen cables and cellphones belonging to officers.
"The officers, who were responding to a suspicious activity, were outnumbered and unfortunately held hostage by the gang of unidentified criminals.
"They held the pair and tied them up, while they were busy stealing protection cables and vandalizing our infrastructure in the process. The guards were ordered to look away or face being killed.
"The Paramedics were also called to provide medical attention and counseling to the two victims."
Mangena says the security at their substations has been beefed up.
"It’s for that reason that we have placed security officers at different substations to ensure that we have added layer of protection in order for us to provide as much of uninterrupted services as possible, to our customers.
"The attacks on our staff and technicians makes it difficult for us to render sufficient services to the residents of Alexandra, with our technicians already not responding to night outage calls in the township due to the attacks".
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