Police officers took three hours to respond to frantic phone calls from Olympic gold medallist Ryk Neethling's neighbours, alerting them to a burglary in progress at his Sandton home - only blocks away from the local police station.
One of Neethling's neighbours, who did not wish to be named, believed that if the police had responded timeously early on Friday, "maybe the thieves could be behind bars".
Instead, the burglars made a clean getaway with several of the swimmer's prized and irreplaceable medals, as well as other items.
He said he and other neighbours had tried to call the police after he was informed of the break-in at Neethling's home, a flat in a secured Sandton complex. He accused the police of being a "lazy bunch who do not have the slightest understanding of what they are paid for".
"They just took their time and we waited for three hours without a sign of them. I believe if they had come immediately, they could have caught the criminals," he said.
He believed that the thieves had intended to clean out a number of flats in the complex and had been watching the area for some time, because last Friday there had been a burglary in another flat and a DVD player and a TV were taken.
Early on Friday the enterprising burglars somehow managed to bypass the complex's security fencing and electric gate, then used ties to fix a stepladder between the first and second storeys of the building. They then propped a bed frame up against the wall, to be able to reach the stepladder.
But the bed frame fell over, waking some of the residents. It appears that the burglars, intending to burgle the second storey, abandoned this plan and instead targeted Neethling's flat on the ground floor.
"I am still baffled about how they entered the complex but I think the way the stepladder was positioned, those guys meant business," said a man staying in the complex.
"These things are very scary because on Tuesday the entire security system was changed - but now, a few days later, these criminals managed to get in," said the man.
He said he had heard a noise at about 2am on Friday, but was scared to go and look because "you never know if the criminals have guns and I don't have one". So he went back to sleep.
He said he woke up again when one of the neighbours called him to tell him that there was a noise at Neethling's flat and she thought somebody was breaking in.
"We all woke up and found Neethling's kitchen window broken and some of his stuff gone. They had left the stepladder hanging and the bed frame was still lying on the ground," he said.
The man said they had called the police several times but they could not manage to summon any help.
"We called them a number of times at around 5am but they only came around at 8am. I don't understand why they came so late because Morningside police station is just five minutes away," he said.
The man said the police arrested a man working in the complex, but "I know they don't know what they are doing because there will be pressure from the media, they want to be seen to be doing something, the man they have arrested would never do anything to jeopardise his job".
Neethling was not in the country at the time of the break-in. He was about to conclude a week-long swimming clinic in Sweden and then go on a 10-day holiday when he received a call from one of his neighbours on Friday morning, to be told of the burglary.
The thieves, who had apparently left an axe outside his flat, escaped with laptop computers, his hi-fi system and speakers, "quite a few" Tag Heuer watches and, most tragically, his precious medals. But his plasma screen television, which was "probably too heavy", was spared.
Speaking to Pretoria News Weekend on Friday, Neethling said: "They didn't get my Olympic medal. That one is in a safe, but I've been told that the cases in which I keep about 30 or 40 other medals were lying empty on the floor. It's these medals that I am really upset about, because I can't get them back."
He said the five medals he would miss the most were his three gold medals from the recent World Short Course Championships in Shanghai, and the gold and silver medals he was awarded at the Commonwealth Games in Australia.
"There are a lot of memories attached to them," he said.
"But they are not worth anything to them (the thieves), they are not real gold. They can't melt them down or sell them. They should just give them back."
Johannesburg police spokesman Captain Schalk Bornman said the allegation that the SAPS had not responded timeously was being investigated.
