Special Report Transcript Episode 71, Section 3, Time 14:24

But then this year the Committee made an interesting finding that seemed to deviate slightly from their earlier positions on race as a political motive. These three men belonged to the AWB and Orde Boerevolk and attacked a bus of black commuters in Durban in 1990 killing seven passengers. The applicants said this was a revenge attack for an earlier attack on white pedestrians by youths wearing APLA T-shirts. They chose the bus as a target because it was transporting black people. The Committee granted amnesty to the two junior members of the cell, Adriaan Smuts and Eugene Marais. They said ‘the conflicts among certain sections of the community was to a great degree a racial conflict…this is one of the truisms of the past’ which is also often avoided or denied but which ‘has to be faced squarely.’ The Committee however refused amnesty to David Botha, the leader of the cell who ordered the bus attack saying that there was ‘no evidence that he had received instructions to carry it out…’