Chris Opperman and Peta Thornycroft
A former journalist has made a sworn statement saying the South African government had propaganda plans to prepare the public for the sudden death of Mozambican president Samora Machel a year before his plane crashed into a hill just inside South Africa in 1986.
The man is believed to be John van Heerden, a former Beeld reporter who has since become a pastor and moved to the United States. He told his extraordinary story in Windhoek two weeks ago to two investigators from the Transvaal attorney generals office.
Van Heerden spoke to the Mail & Guardian last week prior to his departure. He would not give his name, but said he had been haunted since the crash.
He told the attorney generals investigators a year before the crash he had been tipped off by a few members of the State Security Council (SSC) in Pretoria about dissent in the ranks of the ruling and only political party in Mozambique, Frelimo.
When Van Heerden investigated further, he said he uncovered more than that, and believed he had unearthed plans to prepare South Africans for the sudden death of Machel.
He says he wrote a report for his newspaper at the time, but it was never used. He told the attorney generals investigators his contacts at the SSC were demoted or isolated and he felt threatened at work, and left South Africa.
He would not give details of what was in his statement, and the attorney generals office declined to disclose what he had said.
The attorney generals special task team began investigating the Machel crash earlier this year.
The team is understood to be pursuing, once again, whether a false decoy navigational beacon was activated to put the Tupolev 134A-3 aircraft so wildly off course that the Soviet pilot believed he was descending into Maputo airport instead of flying down into the hills near Komatipoort.
The theory goes that if a false decoy beacon was deployed to cause the crash then there must have been an informer very close to Machel someone so close he would have been able to alert his handlers in South Africa that the president would be flying home that October night after a meeting with then Zairean president Mobutu Sese Seko at a resort in northern Zambia.
The theory about a decoy beacon was examined by the board of inquiry into the crash, whose members heartily disagreed with the submission from the Soviet Union claiming the plane had been deliberately misdirected by a navigational beacon.
In the weeks before Machel died, the South African government, in particular defence minister Magnus Malan, escalated threats against Mozambique. Bellicose statements from the South African government and foolish and inaccurate reports leaked to the SABC and newspapers had created a situation of unprecedented tension beween the two countries.
Three days before the crash of flight C9- CAA, Mozambican journalist Carlos Cardoso, who had been watching and analysing the South African threats, wrote a report for the national news agency saying Machel could be one of the chosen targets of the South African military hierarchy …
He recalled this week Machel had agreed that he was an obstacle, that he was in nobodys pocket.
Cardoso said information gathered and analysed over the last decade led him to believe Samora Machel was on his own, he had no support, he was in the way of members of Frelimo enriching themselves.
Frelimo had abandoned him, even those on the left of the party. Not the grassroots, they still supported him. I now believe that if the South Africans did kill him, with a false beacon, then some people here [in Maputo] were also involved.
The situation in Mozambique was very tense, he [Machel] was basically alone, he no longer controlled the army.
Machel returned to Mozambique that night despite a pre-dawn start for the meeting, because he had planned to sack many of his generals early the following morning at a military base just outside Maputo, according to Cardoso and other Mozambican analysts.
Betrayed by the South African governments repeated violations of the Nkomati peace accord of two years earlier and facing escalating invasions by Renamo rebels who inflicted great cruelty on the rural population, Samora Machel was uncharacteristically depressed in the last weeks before his death. He talked about dying quite often.
Former foreign minister Pik Botha, weighed down by preparing his submission for a truth commission hearing on Tuesday, said: I have heard the theory about the beacon, but I thought the international investigators on the inquiry team had dealt with it. But I dont know what to believe these days. If there is any doubt, lets reopen the inquiry.
The first South Africans at the scene of the disaster were security policemen from Komatipoort. It later emerged documents belonging to the Mozambican government and Machels personal papers were removed from the scene, photocopied and then strewn among the casualties lying dead on the hillside.
Botha said this was technically a violation of diplomatic practice, but he said some of the documents contained information that there were plans to topple [Hastings] Bandas regime, and once you are on that kind of track, well then there is another situation.
A former security policeman attached to the SSC said this week he had not been aware of any plan to spread information, either false or true, about Machel or Frelimo before or after the crash.
The attorney generals office is also investigating the crash of a South African Airways jumbo, the Helderberg, off Mauritius 10 years ago, killing all on board. Investigations are centred on the cause of the fire that sent the aircraft into the sea.