Although the African National Congress could not confirm responsibility by late yesterday for the powerful bomb which rocked central Johannesburg earlier in the day, observers in the Frontline states had little doubt ANC guerrillas planted it. The blast, near Witwatersrand Command army headquarters, was in keeping with the ANC strategy of hitting military targets and, according to observers, could be linked to the July 9 assassination in Swaziland of the senior Umkhonto We Sizwe leader, Cassius Make.
Yesterday's explosion, which injured about 70 people, four seriously, was the largest yet in any urban centre, according to the Minister of Defence, Magnus Malan. It was the 11th in Johannesburg this year. It follows the explosion of two car bombs in the Johannesburg Magistrate's Court on May 20, when four policemen who went to investigate the first blast were killed when a second bomb was triggered by remote control.
Johannes Mnisi, the ANC mastermind credited by police with planning both the May 20 operation and the 1983 Pretoria car bomb blast – which killed 19 people and injured 217 – is known to have evaded police to date. An eyewitness who arrived at Witwatersrand Command shortly after the 9.45 am explosion said he saw soldiers rushing out of the blackened building in panics, cocking small revolvers. "Lots of people were running away from the bomb; some were spattered with blood."
He said black pieces of metal were all that remained of the vehicle in which the bomb apparently exploded, across the road from the Witwatersrand Command building and next to the Ster City complex. A car next to it was on fire. "There's nothing left of our offices," said one young soldier blocking the street. "The water bottle on the table vibrated for a second and then exploded into a million pieces, and I saw a telephone flying through the air. There were chairs and tables all over the place".
Broken glass glittered like piles of snow in streets surrounding the Witwatersrand Command. The blast shattered glass in buildings five blocks away. Shaken movie-goers from the Ster cinema described how "the screen fell right off the wall". While first aid workers at Red Cross House in De Villiers Street, 50 metres from the blast, picked their way through their building's shattered glass to attend to the bomb's victims, employees at the nearby Diamond Club scrambled to collect the precious, stones which were strewn everywhere after the building's ceiling collapsed.
"It had to happen here. We are going to move out immediately," said Danny Zulberg, manager of a lighting company whose showroom faces the military command. Conversations overheard among black and white onlookers who gathered in a park opposite the military headquarters reflected the polarised responses to the attack.
One black woman danced a spontaneous jig on the grass, while several muttered quietly that the bomb had been well placed. Among others, mainly whites, there was anger and panic. "Where is (Frederik) Van ZyI Slabbert now?" shouted one man, referring to the leader of the Afrikaans delegation which met the ANC in Senegal recently. A few blocks away in Joubert Park, however, tramps slept in the sun and gardeners watered plants as usual.
This article originally appeared in the Weekly Mail newspaper
