Special Report Transcript Episode 86, Section 5, Time 47:16

Three good friends get together once or twice a year to talk about the old times. They go way back these guys. They were once cops together at Brixton Murder and Robbery. About 10 years ago all 3 suddenly quit the force for a new career on the other side of the law. Between them they have been implicated in murdering or trying to murder at least 6 people including Anton Lubowski and David Webster who both died and Dullah Omar who survived plans to shoot and poison him. Staal Burger, Callas Botha and Slang van Zyl worked for the SADF Civil Cooperation Bureau in the late eighties and formed the core of the CCB’s Region 6, South Africa. They used to go everywhere together. In 1990 they all went to the Harms Commission and lied in concert. Two years later they got together to lie to the Webster inquest. They have all approached the TRC for amnesty with a similar, particularly brief and relatively inoffensive list of what they like to refer to as ‘projects.’ They don’t mention Lubowski and they don’t mention Webster. One man who doesn’t come to their parties is Ferdi Barnard, employed briefly by the CCB before they fired him in the late eighties. His former colleagues now to distance themselves from him, describing him as a third team player who boasted about being in the first. Ferdi Barnard has been an embarrassment to CCB veterans for years. Ever since he was detained for Webster’s murder in 1989 and revealed the existence of the lawless, vicious CCB. With the Harms Commission on politically motivated violence looming them CCB bosses moved in with threats, promises and lawyers and managed some damage control during Harms and later during the Webster inquest. But Ferdi Barnard would just not shut up about his CCB glory days and late last year he became the first CCB operative to be charged for the Bureau’s attacks and the murder of David Webster largely implicated by his own boasts to wives, girlfriends and crime buddies. But the names of the first team players appear on the charge sheet as well. One of them, Slang van Zyl, turned state witness and testified against Barnard this week. He admitted to the same, limited list of CCB hits that Judge Harms had identified 8 years ago including the bombing of the early learning center in Cape Town, the ape fetus hung in Bishop Tutu’s garden and trying to killing Dullah Omar.

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