Pagad

People Against Gangsterism and Drugs, formed in Cape Town in the mid-1990s as a community group to combat the very real problem of criminal gangs. It rapidly degenerated into vigilantism, however, with a series of increasingly violent protests culminating in the lynching of gang leader Rashaad Staggie. Senior members of the organisation have been charged with murder, public violence, intimidation, attempted murder, unlawful possession of firearms, extortion and conspiracy to murder. Pagad, or a splinter group, has been rumoured to be behind a spate of bombings since mid-1998.

Pagad has become a cruel irony in South Africa: They started out as being a harcore group of vigilanties on the Cape Flats (a low economic area on the outskirts of Cape Town), who attacked gang leaders and known drug dealers in the area. They were fighting to save their people from the grip of the drug barrons and vicious criminals who run the area. However, since their inception, Pagad have slowly become more violent and more dangerous than the gangs themselves. Pagad are now full scale terrorists and a dangerous gang in their own right. So in the process, they have become exactly what they started out fighting against.