Cape Town station’s platforms 15 and 16 will be closed until further notice after two motor coaches and five passenger coaches went up in flames there on Saturday, Metrorail said.

The coaches that were burnt out were part of the northern fleet and this would put services at the station under strain.

A loss of R30m and damage to 160 meters of overhead electrical wire was a result of the fire.

Commuters were warned to expect cancellations in the slots usually served by these two train-sets, platform changes and revised arrival/departure times at Cape Town Station as trains using platforms 15 and 16 are slotted into alternative platforms.

“Loyal commuters reliant on rail transport have once again been dealt a blow,” said regional manager Richard Walker.

READ: R30m damage caused by Cape Town train fire

Forensic teams had searched for clues before mop-up began.

Metrorail was working with the police to investigate the incident and encouraged anyone with information or footage of the event to report it to the police.

“While the reasons behind the fire are still sketchy, it is reported that one train arrived at the station, at platform 15, with one of the coaches already on fire,” Prasa spokesperson Nana Zenani said earlier in a statement.

She added, however, that “other reports suggest that the train was set alight when passengers got off the train when it arrived at the station”.

There is a reward of R25 000 for information leading to a successful conviction of the perpetrators.

“I will not let you down,” declared newly elected ANC Gauteng chairperson David Makhura as he called for an end to lobby groups and ill-discipline in the province.

The Gauteng premier, who was elected unopposed as ANC’s provincial chair at its weekend elective conference closed the 3-day gathering, thanking party delegates for a “tremendous success” and giving South Africa’s economic hub a dynamic leadership collective.

Gauteng Education MEC Panyaza Lesufi was elected as deputy chairperson, while Jacob Khawe was elected secretary, Nomantu Nkomo-Ralehoko his deputy and former Johannesburg Mayor Parks Tau as treasurer.

Voting for additional members to make up the provincial executive committee continued well into the afternoon, with delegates having to select over 700 names to make up the province’s top leadership structure.

Some of the candidates who made themselves available to be elected into the PEC included disgraced former Gauteng Health MEC Qedani Mahlangu. The ANC had said she would face the party’s integrity commission for her role in the Life Esidimeni tragedy which resulted in the death of more than 100 psychiatric patients when they were transferred to unlicensed NGOs.

Brian Hlongwa, is another embattled provincial leader who ANC members had to consider for provincial leadership.

This after he was implicated in alleged corrupt activities during his tenure as health MEC in the province.

Fierce contestation and lobbying had taken place in the election of both the top 5 and the additional members, which Makhura said was “no problem” as lobbying was democratic in the ANC but he called for it to end as the conference had come to an end.

ALSO READ: ‘Unity is not just going to happen’ – Magashule tells ANC GP during closing address

“If comrades leave here and convene lobby groups to assess the outcome of the provincial conference, they shall be out of order because the conference is over,” said Makhura

“The lobby groups didn’t win. Branches said we shall take comrades from different lobby groups and put them into a winning team,” said Makhura reflecting on the outcome of the contest, which saw leaders from the different slates being elected to work with one another.

This was very similar to the 2017 national conference outcome, which saw President Cyril Ramaphosa replacing former president Jacob Zuma as the leader of the liberation movement.

“We now leave this conference with a leadership collective and we must rally behind the entire leadership collective elected by this conference,” said Makhura.

The provincial ANC chair also chastised delegates for failing to elect more women to the party’s leadership collective and said this should be corrected at the next conference.

Makhura also pleaded with members not to approach the courts over ANC matters.

“Please don’t go to court on political and organisational matters. We respect the courts,” said the ANC Gauteng chair.

He said leaders respected the judiciary and would go and defend the party if it was challenged by members.

“If you take us to court, we shall go there and win because we run the issues of organisation according to constitution,” said Makhura.

Makhura also said poor people were being used in battles to fight the ANC.

“Let us not allow the enemies of the ANC and our revolution to fund your court actions whose objective to keep the ANC busy in courts, not busy on the ground serving the people,” he said.

The party has said the ANC PEC members will be announced on Monday as counting was still underway.

WASHINGTON, United States – The FBI believed that a former campaign advisor to Donald Trump was “collaborating” with Russia as it worked to influence the 2016 presidential election, top secret documents released to US news organizations have revealed.

The US president hit back Sunday, portraying the wiretapping of his ex-aide as part of a partisan and “illegal” conspiracy because the FBI partly relied on information provided by Democrat-funded research in seeking its warrant.

The October, 2016 application to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court named Carter Page, a former foreign policy advisor to the Trump campaign, according to the documents published late Saturday by The New York Times.

READ: Trump ‘demands’ probe of alleged spying on his campaign

The newspaper, along with USA Today and others, filed Freedom of Information Act lawsuits to obtain the material, which the Justice Department released but with many details redacted.

“The FBI believes Page has been the subject of targeted recruitment by the Russian government,” the initial FBI application says before it is blacked out and continues: “undermine and influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election in violation of US criminal law.”

.@PeteHegseth on @FoxNews “Source #1 was the (Fake) Dossier. Yes, the Dirty Dossier, paid for by Democrats as a hit piece against Trump, and looking for information that could discredit Candidate #1 Trump. Carter Page was just the foot to surveil the Trump campaign…” ILLEGAL!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 22, 2018

;

“The FBI believes that Page has been collaborating and conspiring with the Russian government,” the document adds lower down.

Release of the documents comes just over a week after Special Counsel Robert Mueller, probing possible collusion between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia, indicted 12 Russian intelligence officers, accusing them of hacking Democratic challenger Hillary Clinton’s campaign to steal documents, which were then publicly released.

READ: Comey memos show president Trump obsessed with Russia probe

It also caps a week dominated by Trump’s extraordinary inaugural summit with Vladimir Putin, at which he seemed to take at face value the Russian leader’s denial of election meddling, dismissing the findings of his own intelligence chiefs.

In a series of tweets on Sunday, Trump said the release confirmed the surveillance of his campaign was a “Witch Hunt” because some of the information that led to the wiretapping was provided by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele, who was hired on behalf of the Clinton campaign in 2016.

But Trump’s tweets did not address the fact that the FISA application revealed its sourcing at length and was approved by a judge, before being renewed three more times by three other judges.

– ‘Candidate #1’ –

The surveillance of Page became in February the subject of intense rivalry between lawmakers from Trump’s Republican Party and their Democratic counterparts.

The former released a memo claiming Democratic-funded research prompted the FBI to spy on Page and that the agency was not sufficiently candid with the court about its sourcing.

Trump defied his own FBI director and the Justice Department to declassify the four-page Republican document, which was based on the much larger secret court application record which has now been released.

Andrew McCarthy – “I said this could never happen. This is so bad that they should be looking at the judges who signed off on this stuff, not just the people who gave it. It is so bad it screams out at you.” On the whole FISA scam which led to the rigged Mueller Witch Hunt!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 22, 2018

A counter-memo subsequently made public by the Democrats had argued the surveillance request “was based on compelling evidence and probable cause.”

READ: ‘FBI lovers’ lawyer refuses to testify on alleged anti-Trump bias

Writing on the Lawfare blog, David Kris, who has served as a prosecutor under the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, argued the Republican memo now stood exposed as dishonest.

“Now we can see that the footnote disclosing Steele’s possible bias takes up more than a full page in the applications, so there is literally no way the FISA Court could have missed it,” he said. “The FBI gave the court enough information to evaluate Steele’s credibility.”

In the documents released Saturday, the FBI cited a source which, it said, had a history of providing reliable information regardless of the source’s reasons for conducting research into Trump’s ties to Russia.

Trump is not named in the document but identified only as “Candidate #1.”

– Advisor to Kremlin –

The FBI, in its initial application the month before Trump won the election, said it “believes that the Russian Government’s efforts are being coordinated with Page and perhaps other individuals associated with Candidate #1’s campaign.”

Congratulations to @JudicialWatch and @TomFitton on being successful in getting the Carter Page FISA documents. As usual they are ridiculously heavily redacted but confirm with little doubt that the Department of “Justice” and FBI misled the courts. Witch Hunt Rigged, a Scam!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 22, 2018

It added that “Page has established relationships with Russian Government officials, including Russian intelligence officers.”

Page has not been charged. Appearing on CNN on Sunday, Page denied the allegations. “I’ve never been an agent of the foreign power in any — by any stretch of the imagination.”

He added: “To call me an advisor, I think is way over the top,” before host Jake Tapper interjected to cite a 2013 letter written by Page in which he called himself “an informal advisor to the staff of the Kremlin.”

AFP