OWN CORRESPONDENT, Pretoria | Wednesday 9.00pm.
FORMER police commissioner General Johann Coetzee told the Truth and Reconciliation Commission amnesty committee in Pretoria on Wednesday that he never agreed to any political assassinations, including that of Ruth First.
Coetzee, who is applying for amnesty for the bombing of the ANC’s London offices in March 1982, was questioned at length about a range of attacks and assassinations when he was police commissioner between 1978 and 1985.
Coetzee told the committee he would never had never have authorised the murder in 1982 of Ruth First, the wife of former SA Communist Party leader Joe Slovo, or of Jeanette and Katryn Schoon in 1984.
Coetzee was subjected to extended cross-examination by George Bizos, SC, who is appearing for the Slovo and Schoon families. Former apartheid spy Craig Williamson has applied for amnesty for the murder of First in Mozambique and the Schoons in Angola by means of parcel bombs.
Coetzee insisted in the face of persistent questioning by Bizos that he knew nothing about the planned murders, and claimed he only found out about police involvement 10 to 15 years later.
“If I had known about any plans to have her killed, I would never have acquiesced to the idea… for personal reasons,” Coetzee told the committee, but didn’t explain further. It emerged later that Coetzee, whose interest as a security policman had been to monitor student politics, knew Williamson, First, Marius and Jeanette Schoon while they were students at Wits University in the early 1970s.