OWN CORRESPONDENT, Pretoria | Tuesday 1.30am
FORMER Vlakplaas commander Eugene de Kock said on Tuesday he would not have killed askari Johannes Mabotha if he had known Mabotha was to have testified against Winnie Madikizela-Mandela in a possible high treason case.
He told the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s amnesty committee in Pretoria that he would have found the prosecution of Madikizela-Mandela “suitable”.
De Kock said it would have been to the advantage of the former National Party government if Madikizela-Mandela had been found guilty of high treason.
He is seeking amnesty for shooting dead Mabotha at Penge Mine near Burgersfort in Mpumalanga in 1989. Mabotha was an “askari” police informer who fled the Vlakplaas death squad headquarters to join Madikizela-Mandela’s infamous Mandela United Football Club in Soweto.
De Kock told the committee earlier that he shot Mabotha twice in the heart, after which the body was blown up by about 24kg of explosives.
Former Soweto security police Colonel Jan Potgieter said in his affidavit he had asked De Kock to keep Mabotha safe at Vlakplaas so that he could testify against Madikizela-Mandela.
De Kock denied this, saying Potgieter had asked him to “make a plan” with Mabotha, who was alleged to have been involved in police killings.
Potgieter was at the time investigating charges of high treason against Madikizela-Mandela, but the case never went to court due to a lack of evidence.
9.00am:
THE dirty linen of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela’s entourage in apartheid’s final years was highlighted before the truth commission on Monday, days short of her possible inclusion in Thabo Mbeki’s cabinet.
The TRC heard testimony last year from De Kock and Potgieter that Mabotha had been Madikizela-Mandela’s lover, and that they had been told incriminating and intimate details about her by Mabotha.
Madikizela-Mandela, who played a key role in the ANC campaign for last Wednesday’s general elections, is placed ninth on the party’s election list, to the outrage of opposition parties.
Mabotha was also a key witness in the murder of 14-year-old Stompie Seipei, an activist who was beaten to death in Madikizela-Mandela’s house in January 1988. He had claimed he was ready to testify against Madikizela-Mandela, De Kock said. “Winnie was South Africa’s Joan of Arc, she was the public heart of the African National Congress”, he said.
The terror campaign of the club and the ambiguous relationship some of its members had to the security forces was the subject of two special hearings before the TRC in November 1997 — when Madikizela-Mandela testified — and in January 1998. — AFP