#ICYMI | This week's top stories

From a double murder at a Port Elizabeth retirement facility to the latest goings-on at City Hall, we've put together, in one place, some of the top stories from the past week:

Nelson Mandela Bay mayor Mongameli Bobani’s R500m promise

Projects worth almost R500m will be flowing to SMMEs over the next three years, starting from November, Nelson Mandela Bay mayor Mongameli Bobani vowed on Friday.

His promise to hundreds of SMMEs at the Port Elizabeth City Hall comes less than a week after a majority of his coalition partners asked him to step down.

The ANC, DA, COPE, ACDP, EFF, AIC and PA all want Bobani out of the mayor’s chair.

One-man wrecking ball Bobani’s move against senior managers

A madman, a lunatic and a person without sense is how the ANC described Nelson Mandela Bay mayor Mongameli Bobani after several senior managers were axed on Monday.

With his back against the wall as some coalition partners and the opposition gun for his removal, Bobani has – in less than a week – dismantled the entire executive structure of the municipality.

And political parties are furious, saying the development smacks of desperation by a mayor hell-bent on destroying the municipality.

Police dogs stalked by deadly parvovirus

More than 70 police dogs have died, or been put down, following an outbreak of a deadly virus that could leave K9 units across SA crippled for years.

The national police hub for dog training and breeding, based in Roodeplaat, Pretoria, is under the spotlight after the parvovirus outbreak, which was first reported to the national SPCA in early September.

While it has been contained to the breeding section, an investigation has been launched into the outbreak.

Aspen guilty of collusion

Aspen Pharmacare has less than a month to pay the UK’s National Health Service £8m (R149m) for inflating the price of drugs sold to the service by up to 1,800%.

The SA pharmaceutical giant was, in a provisional finding, named as one of the guilty parties in a collusion scandal by the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA).

The provisional finding was released on Thursday.

Park Drive resident filmed killing peacock with a spade

A resident in the upmarket Fernkloof apartment block in Port Elizabeth's Park Drive faces animal cruelty charges after he was filmed killing a peacock with a spade this week.

The video — which HeraldLIVE has seen but has decided not to post due to its graphic nature — shows Joe Oosthuizen, 63, hitting the peacock repeatedly with the spade and then finally, ignoring shocked and protesting onlookers , placing the sharp edge against the prone bird’s neck and pressing down with his foot, apparently in an effort to decapitate it.  

Then he stuffs the carcass into a plastic refuse bag and walks off.

Sunridge murders raise security concerns

Just six weeks before two elderly Port Elizabeth women were found dead – gagged and tied up – in their rooms at a retirement centre in the city, a matron’s rings were ripped off her fingers in a robbery.

As traumatised residents and relatives gathered at the St John Stella Londt Retirement Centre, where the bodies of Elaine Burns, 91, and Rosemary Langton, 87, were found on their beds in separate rooms on Thursday morning, questions were being raised about the security at the facility in Sunridge Park.

Langton, according to her daughter, was frail, could barely walk and used a hearing aid.

Burns, meanwhile, had just celebrated her birthday.

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