Madlanga Commission: Roelofse says IDAC head Andrea Johnson passed an assault docket to suspect Feroz Khan
Retired Hawks Colonel Kobus Roelofse has told the Madlanga Commission that IDAC head Andrea Johnson forwarded the contents of a 2018 assault docket to the suspect in that case, Major General Feroz Khan, before he had answered the charge. Roelofse said the way the material was moved, through a private email account with a request to delete it, pointed to someone who knew the request was improper. He also said the whistleblower’s protected affidavit later reached the top of the NPA and appears to have come back into the hands of the person it named.
The account came during testimony on Friday, 10 July 2026, in a matter that much of the coverage has framed around the assault itself. Roelofse, who retired from the Hawks in January 2025, used his time before the commission to focus on how the case was handled rather than on the incident that started it.
The case began in 2018, when Crime Intelligence Brigadier Leonora Phetle opened a complaint of assault and intimidation against her superior, Khan, at the Silverton police station. Roelofse said that within days the contents of that docket, including her statement and a medical report, along with an audio recording of the incident, reached Khan through Johnson, who was then a senior prosecutor. According to Roelofse, the material was sent from a private Gmail address to an officer who shared an office with Khan, with an instruction to print it for him and then delete the email. The officer kept the email, and years later came forward as a whistleblower.
Roelofse told the commission the timing was the heart of the problem. He said a suspect is entitled to know the charge against him, but not the complainant’s version, and that Khan received the docket on the same day he was due to give his warning statement. Roelofse said that with a witness’s account in hand beforehand, a suspect can shape his own version to match it, or approach other witnesses before they are formally interviewed. He said he regarded the conduct as defeating the ends of justice, a serious offence, while stressing that this was his assessment and not a finding.
Roelofse pointed to the method as much as the act. He said Johnson, in her position, was entitled to request documents through official channels, so the use of a private account and the instruction to delete suggested an effort to keep the request from being traced. He said Johnson later asked a journalist connected to the matter to move their communication onto the Signal messaging app.
Roelofse was open that much of his conclusion rests on inference rather than proof. He said that when Johnson raised the allegation with him in September 2022, he expected her to explain that she had been misled and to offer a statement of her own. Instead, he said, she told him she had done nothing wrong and did not explain why she had asked for the docket. Roelofse accepted that a denial is not an admission, but said the absence of the reaction he expected was itself telling for an investigator.
He also described what he saw as quiet pressure on a witness. Roelofse said Johnson contacted Barry Bateman, the former journalist who had sourced the documents in 2018, warned him that the Hawks might approach him, and told him not to worry. Bateman was first approached by investigators in 2022, but his formal statement only arrived in June 2026, a gap of 4 years.
The sharpest part of Roelofse’s account concerned how the whistleblower’s own protected affidavit was handled. He said that after he took the matter to then Hawks head Godfrey Lebeya in 2022, the affidavit reached then National Director of Public Prosecutions Shamila Batohi, and that Johnson soon afterwards knew the contents of the affidavit and the identity of the officer who had made it. Roelofse said he could not prove Batohi’s intent and that she has not answered the claims, but that sharing the disclosure with Johnson repeated the very conduct the disclosure described.
The commissioners tested his reasoning. One of them asked whether the docket was effectively already public because a journalist had held it. Roelofse said a leak to a reporter does not place a docket in the public domain, and that this happens only once documents are handed up in open court. Johnson has denied any wrongdoing.
A prosecutor was assigned to consider the case against Johnson only in May 2026, after Batohi retired and Andy Mothibi took over as National Director of Public Prosecutions. No decision on whether to prosecute has been taken, and the commission’s work continues. Johnson remains the head of IDAC. Khan, who was suspended as deputy head of Crime Intelligence earlier this year, was shot outside his home on 28 June 2026, days before he was due to testify, and remains in hospital in a serious condition.
What Roelofse laid out is a pattern he says he has watched for 15 years, one in which some of the people meant to guard the process are the ones who bend it. Whether the commission or a prosecutor accepts his reading is still open. The question his evidence leaves behind is what protection remains for the next whistleblower, when a protected disclosure can travel to the top of the prosecuting authority and come back to the person it was meant to expose.
These are allegations before the Madlanga Commission. No findings have been made against any person named, and no one has been charged.
