Peta Thornycroft
Cape gardener Bennet Sibaya has named Superintendent Des Segal, who died in a car crash three months ago, as the man who “tortured” him to make his claims about what he saw just after the Heidelberg Tavern massacre.
Sibaya made a sworn statement to the police five days after the December 1993 attack that he had seen weapons being loaded into a white Audi in Guguletu on the night of the killings.
He said he had memorised the car’s number plate. The police then confirmed the car belonged to Dumisa Ntsebeza, a respected lawyer who, two years later, would be in charge of investigations at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Sibaya repeated his story to truth commission investigators earlier this year, and made another sworn statement almost identical to the one he first gave the police.
He repeated his story again when he gave evidence to the commission’s amnesty committee last week. During the evidence before the committee he pointed out Ntsebeza as the man he saw sitting in the driver’s seat of the Audi.
But on Monday this week, Sibaya said he had been lying. He apologised to Ntsebeza and to the investigators who had taken his statement, and said he had been the victim of police torture, which he said forced him to memorise the number plate, and Ntsebeza’s face from a photograph he had been shown.
Now Sibaya is understood to have named Segal, a former tough Cape murder and robbery squad detective, as the man who “tortured” him to make the allegation. He has also named another serving policeman as having played a role in torturing him. His written statement naming the policemen, made this week, is sitting with the commission.
But in his evidence before the commission last week, he said he only met Segal a week after he made his sworn statement to the police. And documents from the original investigation show Sibaya was taken to the state prosecutor after he had made his statement.
Four people died and six were wounded in the rifle and grenade attack on the Observatory tavern on December 30 1993. Three former members of the Pan Africanist Congress’s military wing, the Azanian People’s Liberation Army (Apla) were convicted of the murders, and are now seeking amnesty.
There is enormous relief in much of the commission that there is now confirmation of Ntsebeza’s passionate and outraged denial that his car had been either lent or borrowed without his permission for any purpose connected with the attack.
It makes absolute sense to these people that Ntsebeza had been framed. He was a fearless lawyer, who had represented apartheid foe, General Bantu Holomisa and PAC and Apla members, when the old South Africa was busy accusing Holomisa and the Transkei of providing bases for terrorist attacks in South Africa.
But there are others in the commission who remain mystified, anxiously hoping Judge Richard Goldstone will “quieten their hearts”, as one troubled member of the commission put it this week. Goldstone has been tasked by President Nelson Mandela to investigate the saga.
Goldstone will have access to information that eluded the commission. For example, a reward of R250 000 was paid out to about four people who gave information that led the police to the Heidelberg killers.
When the killers lodged their applications for amnesty, Ntsebeza wrote to the police for information about the original investigation, including details of who received the reward. The police blanked out the names, claiming Ntsebeza had been implicated.
But the prosecution did not call Sibaya as a witness during the trial. And he has not been able to explain how, on his gardener’s salary, he has about R40 000 in his bank account.
Nor has there been a rational explanation of how the police managed to “torture” him to make a statement when he was a free man.
So far there has been no information about where Sibaya spent the last 48 hours before his sudden change of heart.
Relatives of those who were killed or injured in the attack have expressed their disquiet.
They make it clear they do not feel Sibaya has told the whole story and they question the integrity of the commission.