Dr Kingsley Makhubela, former SA ambassador to Portugal, says police need to interrogate those who were allegedly lured to fight alongside Russian forces in Ukraine.
This comes after four of the 17 people arrived at OR Tambo International Airport on Wednesday.
In November last year, the South African government received distress calls from 17 people stranded in Ukraine. It is believed that he was lured to Russia under the pretext of a lucrative employment contract.
“Now that they are back home, they need to be interrogated and I think the details will come back. I find it very difficult to understand why the Russians would have held them for so long against their will. I suspect they were conscripted because the Russians are signing contracts with these mercenaries. But now that they are back we need to get more information before we fall into the belief that, in fact, they were taken under false pretenses And yet perhaps they were willing participants in this conflict.”
Makhubela says those who have been repatriated from Russia pose a security risk to the country. He says police need to establish what kind of training people have received.
“The reports we are reading now show that the risk related to people trained in military skills is that some of them have a tendency to get involved in criminal activities. In particular, there are cash robberies in transit. It is said that most of them or some of them who are involved in this have been trained militarily in some way or the other. Therefore, it poses serious security risks to the country, so it is very important for the security agencies to get to the bottom of it and understand whether What's happened is to see how we're going to manage these guys moving forward, understand the level of training.”