Justin Pearce
SUSPICIONS of the Vorster government’s complicity in the 1977 assassination of National Party election candidate Robert Smit and his wife Jeanne-Cora hardened this week following an announcement the police have reopened their investigation into the murders.
The Smits were found dead with multiple stab and bullet wounds in their rented house in Springs days before the 1977 general election.
For the first time in nearly 20 years a well- placed informer has given the police a new lead which led to the reopening of the investigation.
Shortly after the murders, the original investigating officer Lieutenant Gerrit Viljoen told a reporter he believed he would never be able to solve the case.
Ever since the murders there have been several theories put forward about the killings. One was that Smit was about to reveal a scandal involving billions of rand illegally sent out of the country and stashed in a Swiss bank account. The purpose of these funds was allegedly to buy arms for South Africa to circumvent the arms embargo, and to provide a nest-egg for a white South African government- in-exile in the event of the ANC coming to power in South Africa.
Another theory was that Smit was said to have known of a plot to assassinate then-minister of foreign affairs Pik Botha. In 1992 Botha revealed he had indeed been the victim of an attempted assassination, when the steering on his official car was sabotaged shortly after the Smit murders.
Smit, a financial expert and South African representative on the International Monetary Fund, was tipped as a future finance minister.
The Transvaal attorney general’s special
investigative team has assembled a vast arsenal of documents and informants who have assisted in uncovering some of the dirty tricks secrets of the apartheid years. One of these informants is understood to have provided enough information for the Smit murders to be seriously reinvestigated for the first time since the case was closed.
The Mail & Guardian understands the new information is not being seen as a dramatic “breakthrough” but as “progress”. And it seems the new information has done nothing to water down the widely held suspicion that the Smits were assassinated by South Africans, and not by Cuban agents or a German hit squad, as was claimed after the killings.
Neither do the new revelations contradict the belief that the double murder was carried out on official orders, because of financial impropriety at a high government level. The much-publicised “RAU TEM” graffiti found next to the bodies continues to look like no more than a red herring.