TUESDAY, 3.30PM:
TRUTH commissioner Richard Lyster said today that there is no evidence that the murder and secret burials of anti-apartheid activists in KwaZulu-Natal was the work of hit squads, but that the practice was “commonplace” among security police.
“The more we investigate this sort of thing the more we find out that this was fairly commonplace among security police,” said Lyster.
He was speaking after the TRC on Monday exhumed the remains of another activist from a secret grave. The latest remains are believed to be those of a woman thought to have been murdered by police in Durban in the late 1980s, and bring to five the total numbers of cadres whose remains have been found in unmarked graves.
Lyster said the latest remains were found in a pauper’s grave in a cemetery at Groutville on the KwaZulu-Natal North Coast in a follow-up investigation based on the amnesty application of a former security policemen. The woman, a United Democratic Front activist, is believed to have died from a heart attack after being severely assaulted while in police custody. Her body was then dumped in a violence-wracked area to be picked up by local police and given a pauper’s burial as an unknown victim of violence.
Lyster said all evidence at the disposal of the TRC indicates that different groups of policemen were responsible for the deaths of the exhumed activists. There is no evidence that an organised hit squad was responsible for the killings.