BIZARRE EFFORT TO HIDE DRUG BUST ROBS TOWN OF NEWS

'The whole town was in a frenzy and everyone was looking for the
paper. I didn't even have a copy myself'

A PLAN by a group of men to stop publicity of a drug bust by buying
7000 copies of a Kimberley newspaper flopped when the mass purchase
made even bigger headlines.

The city's Diamond Fields Advertiser (DFA) was sold out as it hit the
streets on Tuesday when the group bought every copy available.

The DFA's managing editor, Johan du Plessis, said the men had spent
about R16000 on 7000 to 8000 copies of the newspaper.

Shopkeepers and residents of the city said some of the buyers were
pictured in the drug-bust story on the front page of the newspaper.
They said they believed the men were hoping to prevent people seeing
the story about their arrest.

But, because of the mass purchase, the newspaper decided to print the
same front page a second time the next day, and apologised to its
readers if they had not managed to buy a newspaper the day before.

The court appearance of Schalk van Rensburg, Joel Junius, Lodewyk de
Ridder, Elizabeth Jacobs and Carl van Heerden in the Kimberley
Magistrate's Court on Monday was reported by the newspaper on its
front page on Tuesday.

The other front-page story involved a policeman, Cornelius Abhew, who
allegedly strangled his wife and burnt her with boiling water.

But thanks to the mass buy-up of the newspaper by the men, few of
Kimberley's residents got to see either story on the day.

"It was clearly an attempt to suppress information," said Du Plessis.
"Unfortunately [for the buyers], it had the opposite effect."

The group hit street vendors, supermarkets and the newspaper's
circulation department before 7am on Tuesday and bought every copy
they could lay their hands on. They then loaded the newspapers onto
bakkies and drove off.

The Sunday Times has established that two of the men pictured in the
drug story are sons of prominent Kimberley businessmen.

A Kwikspar owner, Johan Mostert, said a man bought all 40 copies left
in the shop early on Tuesday.

"Afterwards I regretted selling them all to one guy because the whole
town was in a frenzy. Everyone was looking for the paper," said
Mostert. "I didn't even have a copy myself."

The owner of Shell Ultra City, Pieter Dreyer, said he saw a man
standing at the tills at 6am holding 30 copies of the newspaper. "I
said: 'Wait a bit. I can only give you three copies because I have to
keep the others for my regular clients.'

"He was very disappointed," said Dreyer.