Safari lodge owner granted injunction forbidding his rival from hiring hitmen to kill him

A safari lodge owner in South Africa has been granted a legal injunction to prevent his neighbour from hiring hit men to assassinate him. Businessman Ernest Robbertse was granted the extraordinary legal order to stop rival holiday operator Hannes du Preez from paying two killers £500 each to murder him at a popular picnic spot. The shocking injunction was granted by a court in the city of Durban, which has one of the highest murder rates in the already crime-ridden country. While murder is, of course, illegal in South Africa, the civil injunction purports to prevent Mr Du Preez, 55, from ‘inciting’ other people to kill Mr Robbertse.

However, in practice it means that if Mr Robbertse, who owns the Tembe Elephant Park Lodge in South Africa’s KwaZulu Natal region is murdered at the behest of his rival, then his bereaved relatives could claim for compensation on top of the probable murder charge. Mr Du Preez dismissed the allegation that he wanted to kill Mr Robbertse, saying: 'I have never ever intended to kill Robbertse and I have nothing to do with this.' However, in his successful application for the temporary injunction, Mr Robbertse, a 58-year-old father of three, provided a wealth of detail about the alleged plot to murder him. The businessman claimed he had been reliably informed that hitmen were going to lie in wait for him at a well-known picnic spot, which he visited every Friday.



One of Mr Robbertse’s employees told the court that Mr Du Preez had said that he was 'sick and tired of Robbertse'. Du Preez allegedly went on to say that 'he knew exactly where [Robbertse] stopped every Friday on his way to the lodge, namely a picnic spot at a place called Enseleni, and that he intended to pay two people he knew about R10,000 (£1,000) to murder him on the spot', the court heard. The two businessmen operate similar elephant safari holiday operations in the same area of the north east of the country. Mr Robbertse told the court: 'I often travel alone through remote areas by using the same route to get to Tembe Elephant Park Lodge.

'It is, I submit, obvious that the threat is serious, that the respondent intends to carry it out, that I have no way properly to protect myself and that this application cannot possibly be delayed. In short, I fear that I might die if relief is not immediately granted.' Du Preez, who is a father-of-four and grandfather to five, adamantly denies being involved in any plot to kill his neighbour, saying: 'This is nothing more than a smear campaign intended to try and discredit me.' Nonetheless, the Durban High Court granted an interim interdict preventing Du Preez from inciting community members to evict Robbertse by 'killing, assaulting, harming or employing other persons to kill, assault, harm or threatening' him.