PIET, Christopher

... I collapsed. // There was not even one policeman who came to inform me about this. // I went to see the mother of Jabulani Miya and of Christopher Piet. I was the first person who’d been to see them of any … I wasn’t an official, I was a journalist, but nobody else had been to see them. ...

March 3rd, 1986. A shootout at a Gugulethu crossroads leaves seven dead. Police alleged that the young men killed that morning were trained cadres of an ANC cell planning to attack a staff bus which regularly crossed this intersection. Finding themselves under attack, the police said, they were ...

In 1986 the security police were notching up so-called anti-terrorism successes all over the country, but in the Western Cape their record was poor and this man, Capt Riaan Bellingan was dispatched from the special counter-terrorism unit at Vlakplaas to help Cape Town security police improve their ...

The Truth Commission brought several serving and former policemen to the public hearing in Cape Town this past week to talk about their role in a shooting spree in Nyanga in March 1986. In a day of high drama it was revealed for the first time that Vlakplaas members were involved in the gruesome ...

Mrs Gonile, Cynthia Ngebwa, Irene Mxinwa and Eunice Miya, four of the mothers of seven young men who were shot dead in Gugulethu ten years ago still don’t know the full truth behind the death of their sons. // But the worst part was to actually see this in the newspapers and the TV. When we saw ...

The clearest element about the Gugulethu Seven massacre is its murkiness. What we do know is that of the 22 police involved in the operation, some have taken responsibility for some of the deaths. But whether police shot and killed the young men has never been the issue. The question is whether the ...