Vlakplaas

... who reluctantly admitted that the suspected ANC cell had been infiltrated. Then, he even more reluctantly agreed that the infiltrators were Vlakplaas askaris. The infiltrators had informed them of the planned attack. The police and the Vlakplaas operatives then planned their strategy for ...

We were instructed to make it look like a robbery. // Who instructed you? // Brigadier van der Hofen. A hunting knife was brought down from Vlakplaas, I can’t recall whether we bought the other okapi knives in Durban or whether that also came from Vlakplaas. I got a report back from him that ...

... of the whore.’ These were the words security policeman Dirk Coetzee used exactly seven years ago to describe his role as the commander of the Vlakplaas death squad. And this week Coetzee and two of his colleagues told their horror stories to the nation. They were in the heart of the whore. ...

... the arrests of two of them and on Friday they appeared in court charged with the same acts they wanted to confess to next week. The men are former Vlakplaas commander and Northern Transvaal security police chief Brigadier Jack Cronje, Captain Jacques Hechter, Captain Wouter Mentz and Colonel ...

Eugene de Kock rejected it. I was actually living on Vlakplaas. Williamson didn’t know I was living on Vlakplaas at that time. As soon as he left, Eugene called me and said the guy has just been here and asked me to kill you. And he told him that if he wanted to kill me he should do it. But ...

This week the Committee reconvened in Cape Town to hear testimony from this man, Xola Frank Mbane known as Jimmy. From 1984 to 1992 Mbane was a Vlakplaas based askari. He claims that his career spanned 40 missions; that he was responsible for at least ten killings and he also testified as Mr. X in ...

... both particularly in the South African expatriate community – you know we have information about hoteliers who gave free accommodation to Vlakplaas, we have information on restauranteurs who would give free meals to Vlakplaas operatives. It’s not an entirely one sided story, it’s a ...

[Vlakplaas placed Cape Town on the map] // He was accompanied to Cape Town by this Vlakplaas colleague, Constable Thapelo Mbelo and two askaris. Shortly after their arrival in Cape Town their first high profile operation in collaboration with Cape Town security police took place, the killing of the ...

The Truth Commission can, according to the Act of Parliament that governs them, investigate the gross human rights violations perpetrated by Vlakplaas, but there are other apartheid practices that did even more damage to generations of our people that cannot be narrowly defined as individual human ...

They weren’t the best behaved guys we had. They all smoked and all drank heavily. And everyone that smoked also smoked dagga. // You were not smoking at that stage? // No, I was not smoking, but drinking a lot. // Pillay was delivered into the hands of Dirk Coetzee at Vlakplaas.

... criminal responsibility and I think one could actually question that. The whole concept of vicarious liability, the putting into place things like Vlakplaas, the CCB, where you must have a sense that things can go horribly wrong. Now I think that’s what we would like to get an answer on. // I ...

Former Vlakplaas commander Dirk Coetzee was supposed to testify this week, but he was prevented by legal technicalities. This is what he would have told the Commission. // Nick van Rensburg and his men poisoned him upon release, poisoned him and apparently he did not add enough poison according to ...

... house of horrors is also the place where the security police killed two other Eastern Cape activists: Siphiwo Mtimkulu and his friend Topsy Madaka. Vlakplaas it seems is not the only farm of death. Thank you for staying with us. The amnesty applications of the Chris Hani killers continue in ...

... had been convicted were kept secret to protect their families. The Goldstone Commission’s report on Boipatong was never publicly released. Former Vlakplaas commander Dirk Coetzee says the police death squads were ...

started a whole new trend. But few people know about the events which led to this killing frenzy in Duduza on the East Rand. // Joe Mamasela, former Vlakplaas operative, was the first to explain his complicity in the gruesome deaths of eight people on the East Rand in 1986. But he is not the only ...

We’ve all heard of the dramatic stories of Dirk Coetzee and Eugene de Kock’s hit squad at Vlakplaas and the shady army unit, the CCB. And there is an impression that these formed the heart of the apartheid government’s violent strategy of torture and murder against pro-democracy activists. ...

Former Vlakplaas boss, Dirk Coetzee declared in 1989 already that he fetched poison from the head of the forensics laboratory Gen Lothar Neethling in 1981 and gave it to two activists Vusi Mavuso and Peter Dlamini. Neethling denied this and said he never developed poison, a statement later ...

The worst part of it is that one couldn’t get out of it, you will just disappear like Ace Moema, we don’t know where he is. Many other people that were in Vlakplaas, they just disappeared. Even if you asked … if you posed a threat to the security, you’re gone.

Vlakplaas and the askaris did become the main instrument in the killings in the 1980s and early 1990s, yes. The Mxenge killing, I mean I couldn’t walk as a white man into a black township and I would stand out like a sore finger. So you need black guys to cooperate and do the job for you and act ...

... also serve as a powerful warning to future generations not to repeat the mistakes of the past. But how do we in South Africa do this? For instance Vlakplaas, the death squad headquarters, could be turned into a public park or Steven Bantu Biko’s gravesite into a national monument. Robben ...