Who is . . . ‘Suiker’ Britz?
Stefaans Brummer
Assistant Commissioner Karel “Suiker” Britz wears grey shoes. Or if he doesn’t he should, for he fits snugly into that category of old-guard cops with nicknames like “Snor” and “Balletjies”.
But while Britz does sport an impressive moustache, and presumably has the other attribute as well, there is something that sets him apart from these apartheid relics: he has survived.
It is not Britz’s verbal skills or his sense of decorum that landed him his job as head of the impressively named South African Police Service murder and robbery, illegal firearms and special projects component.
Since the weekend, he has been telling the world that, on the evidence gathered by Mozambican police, foreign affairs official Robert McBride is guilty of gunrunning and should stew for it.
Having confirmed that version to television news on Monday, Britz added this unique rider: in terms of an agreement with his Mozambican counterparts, he could not discuss the merits of the case. Sweet like a lemon, as they say.
Britz’s zeal in pursuing McBride – he shot off to Mozambique shortly after McBride’s arrest on Monday last week – has revealed a new side of the man.
The last, and perhaps only, other time that Britz took a case against a serving government official as seriously was when he reopened the investigation into the 1981 murder of anti-apartheid lawyer Griffiths Mxenge.
The result: a costly court hearing in 1996 against Dirk Coetzee, the former Vlakplaas hitsquad commander who had confessed his part in the murder seven years earlier.
The court’s finding against Coetzee, by then an employee of the new National Intelligence Agency and still an object of the old guard’s wrath for having “sold out” and told all, was rendered futile by the parallel process of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s amnesty hearings.
Coetzee was convicted by the court, but got his amnesty.
Another probe in which Britz took part, this time when Coetzee was on the receiving side of crime, was less successful. Britz was member of a team of detectives who travelled to London in 1991 to interview Coetzee about the cassette-player bomb attempt o n Coetzee’s life, which killed lawyer Bheki Mlangeni instead.
Britz and his colleagues had no luck in solving that one – the honour was left to then Transvaal attorney general Jan D’Oliveira’s special investigative team, who got Eugene de Kock, Vlakplaas commander after Coetzee, convicted for it.
By all counts, Britz must be an excellent detective. His curriculum vitae some years ago boasted about the 69 cases where his investigations secured death penalties, and about his work on high-profile cases like the Church Street bomb, where Dutch citize n Klaas de Jonge was identified as the culprit.
But again, there were other bombings where Britz’s level of success left much to be desired.
In 1993 he was tasked to re-investigate the then-unsolved “Motherwell bombing”, in which security policemen silenced some of their colleagues by blowing them up in their car – a crime originally blamed on Umkhonto weSizwe.
There was new evidence, but Britz’s leads went cold. D’Oliveira’s team solved the case a couple of years later and secured convictions.
The 1984 letter bomb that killed Jeanette Schoon, the wife of African National Congress exile Marius Schoon, and their six-year-old daughter, Katryn, in Angola also proved a hard one for Britz to crack.
Apartheid “superspy” Craig Williamson confessed to his role in the bombing in 1994, and Britz was tasked to investigate. A year lapsed without visible results and – unlike the Coetzee case, where Britz was adamant that justice must take its course – Will iamson was first to the post with an amnesty application.
But Britz’s most spectacular failure yet must be the 1980s killing of activist couple Fabian and Florence Ribeiro, perpetrated by apartheid military and police operatives.
Britz’s investigation at the time uncovered nothing. The story goes that he left the docket in the boot of his car, from where it was stolen.
The honour in solving the case went to the truth commission last year, after valuable work by D’Oliveira’s team.
In October 1995 the Mail & Guardian pointed out the inexplicable discrepancy in Britz’s performance – between his high success rate when it came to solving ordinary and “terrorist” crime and his dismal failure when it came to booking the perpetrators of apartheid crime.
Secretary of safety and security Azhar Cachalia appointed an inquiry, which found five months later that no finding could be made either way, partly because police colleagues of Britz would not talk.
The finding meant Britz kept his job, and he has been able to build a police empire which includes investigating the most sensitive of cases.
The finding also meant it may be slanderous to call Britz a “sweeper”, the name apartheid’s cops gave to those among them who had to “clean” a crime scene of evidence implicating the real perpetrators.
But if you do happen to bump into Britz at the scene of a crime, whether in South Africa or Mozambique, and he is pointing to the left, it may be worth your while to look right as well.
Defining characteristics: Grey shoes
Favourite people: “Snor”, “Krappies”, “Staal”, “Balletjies”
Favourite car: A Nissan 4×4, which is what Robert McBride drove – too slow to make the border
Likely to say: “He/she is guilty/innocent” when a court of law may find the opposite
Least likely to say: “Let the courts decide”