Stefaans Brmmer
Mininster of Safety and Security Sydney Mufamadi has shrugged off murder claims against Superintendent Lappies Labuschagne, the member of the police team investigating Robert McBride – but now Mufamadi faces civil action for the death of one of Labuschagne’s alleged victims.
Mufamadi and police Deputy Commissioner Zolisa Lavisa have resisted calls for Labuschagne’s removal from the team helping Mozambican police probe the McBride gun-running allegations.
The Mail & Guardian last Friday published claims by convicted police hit man Eugene de Kock that former security policemen Labuschagne and Johan Botha had assassinated prominent African National Congress cadres in Swaziland in 1987, including national executive member Cassius Maake, Umkhonto weSizwe (MK) commander Paul Dikeledi and an MK special operations chief, “Comrade Viva”. Two young South African students, apparently only ANC sympathisers, were also killed when Viva was ambushed.
Mufamadi reportedly responded by saying the allegations were “untested and malicious”, while Lavisa put out a statement saying the police did not “discriminate against any member only on the basis of previous affiliations, unless we have reliable and proven evidence of past human rights violations”.
But Viva’s widow, former MK member Felicia Dlodlo, is preparing civil proceedings against Labuschagne and Botha – and against Mufamadi in his capacity as police minister – for the death of her husband, whose real name was Theophilus Dlodlo. Her lawyer at the Legal Resources Centre in Johannesburg is also considering criminal charges against the two policemen.
Ironically, the identity of her husband’s alleged killers was confirmed to Dlodlo last Monday, the day Labuschagne was appointed to the McBride team, when she visited De Kock in prison. This ended 11 years of uncertainty which was not resolved when she pleaded, at a televised hearing of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission two years ago, and again on the Truth Commission Special Report in February, for help in finding her husband’s killers.
The truth commission has had access for some time to De Kock’s amnesty application and trial records, which name Labuschagne and Botha as Viva’s killers, but never put two and two together to inform Dlodlo.
Dlodlo this week told the M&G about her meeting with De Kock: “I had a strange mixture of emotions. First of all I was relieved to put names to the people who did it. But at the same time there was a feeling of anger. I appeared twice on television. Even if [Labuschagne and Botha] didn’t see it, someone must have told them. And they have not applied for amnesty.”
De Kock told Dlodlo how Labuschagne had told him how he and Botha followed and fired at a car driven by Viva in a suburb of Mbabane on May 22 1987. Viva and two students in the car with him were killed.
Dlodlo still has niggling suspicions that her husband, who had been appointed area chief of special operations for MK, may have been sold out by apartheid state collaborators within the ANC, as he was apparently investigating them at the time. De Kock told her this was possible, and that the tip-off about Viva’s whereabouts had indeed come from an informer.
Said Dlodlo: “One of the things that really haunts me is that for the first time [the night before his death] he told me he was frightened. I said: ‘Is it because the Boers are around?’ He said yes, but also because people we thought we could trust, we can’t trust them anymore.”
About Labuschagne investigating McBride, she said: “Robert McBride was my hero. He may or may not be guilty, but it angers me that someone who killed my husband should investigate someone whom we regarded as a hero.”