Kruger committed a series of armed robberies in the Pinetown area of KwaZulu-Natal in 1991 in which three men were killed: a pharmacist, Adriaan Combrink; a telephone operator, Johannes Loggienberg; and a bank manager.
He was arrested in November 1991 and sentenced to death in 1992. South Africa suspended executions in 1990 and abolished the death penalty in 1995, and his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.
He escaped from custody. During the events that followed he took hostages at the Pinetown police cells, and he was shot dead there by police snipers.
The accessible record is South African press reporting and summary entries, and it is not consistent on the dates of the escape and the siege. The entry records the sequence, which the sources agree on, and not dates that they do not.