Police are probing a prodigious $140 million (Australian currency) cocaine bust in Australia and a one-ton cocaine consignment from an Eastern European drug-smuggling syndicate as the possible reasons behind former footballer Marc Batchelor’s brutal killing may be linked to the hit on, as source disclosed to the Sunday Times.
ABC News reported that two men were apprehended after a business in Bungendore, Australia, was raided on July 15, and about 384 kilograms of cocaine with an estimated street value of over R1.4 billion was seized.
The raid occurred a day before Marc Batchelor was gunned down by two armed suspects on motorbikes at his home in Olivedale, Johannesburg.
Daily Afrika on earlier on July 18 also reported and published the same story where cocaine was confiscated in the arm of a secondhand excavator imported to Port Kembla from South Africa. The covertly clandestine narcotics stunned the Australian Border Force, who estimated that the cocaine would have resulted in over a million street deals.
Batchelor was murdered in an act of revenge hit for an alleged role in the theft of a ton of cocaine smuggled late in 2018.
This is the same team of detectives from the organized-crime unit which has been investigating into the murder of Serbian national Ivan Djordjevic, who was shot dead in a similar incident at his Bryanston residence in April, according to the weekly newspaper.
Ivan Djordjevic, 59, was shot many times after driving into the Highbury residential complex in Bryanston. The shooting was captured on CCTV, according to News24.
The Sunday Times published that Djordjevic went into business with Batchelor in 2018, who ran a debt-collection company. It said the two were allegedly involved in the theft of cocaine.
“The drugs came to SA via Port Elizabeth and Cape Town harbours in December last year from Brazil and the Netherlands,” according to the paper.
Rapport on Sunday divulged that Batchelor had “made the wrong people angry”.
Batchelor died after he was shot several times in his car outside his Randburg Olivedale residence, northern Johannesburg. He was travelling with his gardener and dog in his BMW X5 when he was gunned down by armed with semi-automatic assault rifles on the dusk of July 15, riding on a white motorcycle as also reported by Daily Afrika news on July 15th how Batchelor was killed by his assailants.
The South African football superstar grew up in Johannesburg’s north-eastern suburbs and attended school in Sandringham. He was buried in Midrand on Thursday.
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