Stefaans BrUmmer
QUESTIONS are being asked about a foray to a plush Johannesburg shopping centre by ex-security police captain Michael Bellingan, who is serving a 25-year prison sentence for the brutal murder of his wife.
Bellingan — who was heavily involved in “dirty tricks” against, among others, the National Union of Metalworkers during his career as a security policeman — killed his wife, Janine, in September 1991 after she threatened to expose how he had defrauded the trade union. He was sentenced last year.
Last month, Bellingan, who is an inmate of Diepkloof Prison near Soweto, was allegedly seen walking in Johannesburg’s Killarney Mall by a former acquaintance.
The acquaintance, who asked not to be named, said Bellingan was not accompanied by police or prison officials. The acquaintance said she thought the man with him was Mannie Witz, Bellingan’s trial advocate.
Both Witz and Paul Leisher, who was instructing attorney in the trial, this week denied they had been with Bellingan outside prison. Leisher, who has been friendly with Bellingan for years, said he had asked him whether he had been in the mall, and he had denied it.
Witz said he had not seen Bellingan this year. “If it was me [at the Killarney Mall] I’d have told you, and I would have told you why.”
Official Diepkloof records show Bellingan had permission to leave prison for “reasonably frequent” medical visits to, among others, Johannesburg’s Garden City Clinic this year, a senior Department of Correctional Services officer said this week — but he said it would always have been in the company of prison warders.
He said records also showed requests by police or judicial authorities for Bellingan to leave prison to help with unsolved cases, where he may be a witness, had been granted on February 15, June 27 and July 5.
The official said the request for such a pass had to be approved by either a police station commander or district commander, and that he would have had to have been guarded by police.
The Mail & Guardian has established that on all three dates supplied by the prison official, Bellingan’s passes had indeed been requested by judicial or police authorities intending to enlist his help in investigations. But the authorities said Bellingan had been accompanied by police at all times.
Meanwhile, Bellingan is understood to have approached the Truth and Reconciliation Commission with a possible amnesty application. At the time of his trial, there was speculation that Bellingan, who maintained his innocence throughout, could have received help from his security police colleagues in carrying out the murder. The commission does not release the names of individual amnesty applicants before their cases are heard.
The African National Congress’s Carl Niehaus, chair of the parliamentary committee on Correctional Services, this week said he had asked prison authorities to look into the matter.