British Falklands War Hero Shot Dead on Farm by Armed Raiders

South African
GULSHAN KHAN/AFP/Getty Images
Jack Montgomery

A British Falklands War hero has been murdered in an armed raid on the South African farm where he was living with his partner.

59-year-old Royal Navy veteran Julian Stobbs died after being shot in the head and chest during a “struggle” with four armed men at Jazz Farm in Lanseria.

He was attempting to protect his partner, 53-year-old Myrtle Clarke, after the raiders returned to the property and entered their bedroom despite having already stolen laptops, mobile phones, and jewellery, according to reports.

Mr Stobbs was one of three victims of deadly farm attacks in South Africa over the weekend, with 45-year-old Afrikaans singer Wynand Breedt also being shot dead at a farm in Worcester and 26-year-old pregnant mother-of-two Zakiyya Ahmedjan having her throat slit on a farm in Weenen, Ladysmith.

Civil rights group AfriForum warned in 2018 that the murder rate for South Africa’s farmers was four times the national average — in a country already known for a fantastically high average murder rate — with some reports describing it as the most deadly occupation in the world outside an active war zone.

Such reports on farm attacks, which sometimes feature particularly gruesome acts of violence including gang rape, torture with hot irons, and victims being hacked into pieces with machetes, even led U.S. President Donald Trump to order an investigation into the “large-scale killings” in the country.

However, the AfriForum statistics and Present Trump’s characterisation of the situation in South Africa have been disputed by the country’s government and by much of the mainstream media, citing left-leaning fact-checkers using Agri-SA figures to suggest that farm killings have in fact plumbed historic lows in recent years.

AfriForum and others have dismissed the South African Police Service (SAPS) figures used to support these claims as fabrications, however, compiling publicly reported killings into lists to show that many known victims do not appear to be included in the official statistics.

White South African farmers also face having their land seized without compensation by the African National Congress (ANC) government — which has strong Marxist leanings, praising the “exemplary role of the collective leadership of the Communist Party of China” in 2015 and fielding candidates on behalf of the South African Communist Party (SACP) .

Robert Mugabe, the recently departed former president of neighbouring Zimbabwe — an out and out Marxist — executed a similar plan in the early 2000s.

After Zimbabwe’s white-owned farms were expropriated, so-called squatters moved in and took possession of them, often violently, and even to the point of murdering their former owners — with Mugabe vowing the murderers would not be prosecuted.

The end result, infamously, was the collapse of agricultural production in a country once hailed as the “Breadbasket of Africa” — along with an economic depression and hyperinflation.

In the case of South Africa, the Australian government has previously hinted at fast-tracked visas for the farmers — a proposal denounced as “ridiculously racist” by the left — but the British government under former premier Theresa May indicated that it actually supports the land grabs.

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