PAEDOPHILE LINKED TO NATS
The jailed son of paedophile Gert van Rooyen sparked a new controversy on Sunday with claims in the Sunday Independent that his father had abducted children for cash on behalf of a network that included three former National Party cabinet ministers.
The older van Rooyen killed himself in 1991 as police closed in on him. His son Flippie van Rooyen, serving a life sentence for murder, will be asked to undergo lie detector tests as police announced on Sunday that they will open investigations into the truth of his claims. Van Rooyen, who has also implicated senior police officials in his father’s ring, claims that his father was in fact murdered to silence him.
CHOLERA IN MOZAMBIQUE The Mozambican Health Ministry on Monday sent out a call for retired doctors and nurses to come back to work to help fight a cholera epidemic. The ministry has also closed the Maputo Health Science Institute temporarily and deployed students to serve in the cholera wards at Maputo Central Hospital. Sixty people have died from the disease since it erupted in Maputo province two months ago and it appears to be spreading to other areas in southern Mozambique.
NOT FAST ENOUGH Police in Johannesburg on Monday were warning joggers and walkers to leave their Rolexes and gold jewellery at home when they go out to get a bit of exercise. Joggers, said police, are being targeted by muggers. In one attack, a Morningside couple out for a morning walk were robbed of watches and rings worth R25 000, half an hour after a jogger in the area was robbed of her walkman, sunglasses, watch and wedding ring; recently, said police, a woman jogger in Parktown was robbed of R30 000 worth of jewellery.
KICKED TO DEATH
A BLACK petrol station attendant was kicked to death by six white men in Claremont, Johannesburg, in what appears to have been a racially motivated attack. Jacobs Tselapedi, his girlfriend and their baby, and another man were walking down a Claremont, Johannesburg street after midnight, when they were attacked by six strangers. The girlfriend fled with the baby, but the men were beaten to the ground and brutally assaulted. Both were admitted to Helen Joseph hospital, where Tselapedi died of his injuries.
HEYNS MURDER WEAPON SEARCH FAILS
POLICE have abandoned attempts to find the hunting rifle allegedly used to kill former NG Church moderator Johan Heyns after 12 divers spent a fruitless weekend searching the Hartebeespoort dam, north-west of Pretoria. Pretoria casino owner Johan Badenhorst last month claimed his murdered business partner, Terence Psarrakis, had hired someone to assassinate Heyns at his Pretoria home in 1994. Earlier this year, the two of them had thrown the weapon into Hartebeespoort Dam.
NOTIFIABLE AIDS Health Minister Nkosazana Zuma, chairing a meeting in Kenya this week of the UN Aids programme co-odinating board, is going to press for debate on whether to make Aids a notifiable disease without compromising the identity of those living with Aids/HIV, according to the Health Ministry. The meeting has drawn African health ministers and World Health Organisation officials.
TURNAROUND ON GAY RIGHTS The Justice Ministry, which initially said it would oppose an application to decriminalise same-sex relations, now says it’s happy with it. Justice Minister Dullah Omar’s objections to the application were on “technical points”, says the ministry, and those have now been corrected. The application, filed by the National Coalition for Gay and Lesbian Equality and the Human Rights Commission, was for an order which will declare certain common law offences void, among them sodomy and “unnatural sexual acts between men”. A high court hearing is set for November 25 in Johannesburg.
MANDELA IN SAUDI ARABIA President Nelson Mandela arrived in Saudi Arabia at the weekend for talks about defence, oil and bilateral ties. With him are Defence Minister Joe Modise, Energy Minister Penuell Maduna and Public Enterprises Minister Stella Sigcau.
SWAPO DEMOS GO HOME THE 200 former Swapo guerrillas who have camped out in the gardens of parliament for a fortnight in protest over the goverment’s failure to provide jobs for them, trickled away over the weekend after President Sam Nujoma urged them on national television to “go home”
Nujoma said the repeated demonstrations were “counter-productive” and that the government had got the message and was making an effort to find work for the ex-soldiers.
KABILA REJECTS FRANCOPHONE COMMUNITY The Democratic Republic of the Congo will not be participating in La Francophonie, state radio announced at the weekend, as representatives of the other 48 nations of the French-speaking world were meeting in Vietnam. According to the broadcast, Congo President Laurent Kabila sees the group a “an extension of neo-colonialism in which independent nations are under France’s umbrella”.
UN MEDIATOR TO MEET SAVIMBIA delegation of mediators in the Angolan peace talks are set to meet Unita rebel leader Jonas Savimbi in his stronghold in Andulo in the central highlands on Monday in an effort to restart peace talks. The United Nations secretary-general’s special representative, Alioune Blondin Beye, will lead the delegation, which was requested at the weekend by top Unita negotiator Isaias Samakuva.