The truth commission has subpoenaed policeman `Lappies’ Labuschagne about his alleged involvement in the killing of ANC leaders, write Wally Mbhele and Stuart Hess
The police detective connected to the arrest of foreign affairs official Robert McBride is allegedly implicated in an attempted assassination in exile of top African National Congress leaders, including Joe Slovo, Chris Hani and chief of the South African National Defence Force Siphiwe Nyanda.
The allegations against Frans “Lappies” Labuschagne form part of a detailed collection of allegations that this serving police officer faces at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. He is also accused of abducting and torturing Nyanda’s wife, Sheila. He is named as one of several security police officers who held cigarette lighters to “the most sensitive parts” of Sheila Nyanda’s body after she was abducted from Swaziland in May 1987.
These allegations will be put to Labuschagne when he is questioned by a truth commission in-camera hearing on June 30. The commission will also ask him to answer an allegation that he used Nyanda’s car when he assassinated two senior African National Congress members – Cassius Maake and Paul Dikeledi – two months after he tortured Sheila Nyanda.
The commission has information that when Labuschagne went into Swaziland to allegedly murder the two ANC members, he resprayed Nyanda’s car. Maake, who was assassinated in July 1987, is among the 20 ANC leaders whose names appear on the police hit-list Labuschagne will be questioned about.
In building a watertight hearing against him, the truth commission is understood to have interviewed several witnesses, including former Vlakplaas leader Eugene de Kock, who is believed to have shed some light on the details of how he stopped Labuschagne’s hit squad from killing Nyanda after torturing her.
It is also understood that De Kock has revealed how he discovered Labuschagne was “putting together his own hit squad” when he made a requisition for arms from Vlakplaas. A Vlakplaas operative, Schalk Visser, is believed to have been “the one who went to Brigadier [Willem] Schoon to request weapons on behalf of Labuschagne”. The truth commission wants to know what happened to those weapons, which included several rifles and pistols, some fitted with silencers.
Labuschagne – who has not applied for amnesty – is understood to have threatened the commission with a high court order this week in an attempt to block the planned in- camera hearing. He will be represented by the same lawyers who are acting on behalf of several Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging members currently seeking amnesty for a spate of pre- election bombings.
Labuschagne recently shot into the headlines when he was appointed to the team of South African detectives assigned to assist the Mozambicans in the McBride investigation. He was removed from the investigation, however, following the intervention of Minister of Safety and Security Sydney Mufamadi after his possible links to the McBride set-up were published in the Mail & Guardian.
It has emerged that Labuschagne, in his present curriculum vitae, mentions two of the most senior Mozambican intelligence and police officers as his referees. They are the national director of intelligence services in Mozambique, Leonard Mathiya, and a General Guma, head of the detective services.
The truth commission will question Labuschagne on what effect such relationships had on the McBride arrest, and when he was involved in hit-squad operations in Swaziland and Mozambique.
It has also emerged from documents before the truth commission that Labuschagne has since the late 1980s been one of the police handlers of the discredited police and military intelligence operative, Vusi Mbatha.
“Lappies handled a wide range of sources. One of them was Vusi Mbatha, who operated in Swaziland several years back,” said a source at the truth commission.
Mbatha is being held in a Mozambican prison with McBride. Both the South African and Mozambican police plan to use him as their chief witness against McBride.
Labuschagne will also be questioned by the commission about the extent of his relationship with another controversial policeman, Assistant Commissioner “Suiker” Britz. He was the first to be removed from the McBride investigation, following his controversial pronouncements shortly after McBride’s arrest that the foreign affairs official was guilty of gun-running.
Felicia Dlodlo, wife of one of several of Labuschagne’s alleged victims, this week told the M&G that her husband, Theophilus Viva Dlodlo, was killed two months after Sheila Nyanda’s abduction.
Dlodlo, who was travelling with two others in a car, was killed when the car in which they were travelling was ambushed in Swaziland. His name and movements were apparently traced from documents which were seized from Nyanda’s car after her abduction.
Labushagne’s alleged intimate relationship with Civil Co-operation Bureau agents who operated in Mozambique and Swaziland will also come under the spotlight during the hearing.