CHRISTIAN FIGENSCHOU, Johannesburg | Sunday 8.30pm.
ROBERT McBRIDE will brief the Cabinet and African National Congress leadership about what he was doing when he was arrested in Mozambique in March, according to ANC legal chief Mathews Phosa.
Phosa said on Saturday that the Cabinet has assigned Safety and Security Minister Sydney Mufamadi to deal with the ” McBride affair”. Mufamadi said he has received a request for a meeting with McBride, and that he is “looking for a space on my diary”. Meanwhile, in a possible sign of the importance government is giving McBride’s claims, Mufamadi left for the Lesotho capital Maseru on Sunday at the head of a South African delegation seeking to facilitate talks between opposition parties and the government in the ongoing stand-off in the kingdom.
In a statement on Friday, meanwhile, McBride denied ever having claimed he was in Mozambique for the National Intelligence Agency, and admitted he was there on his own initiative to “verify information that had been passed on” to him.
McBride reiterated that in the past he had “worked at an operational level with agents both from the NIA and from [the SA Secret Service]” and stands by this contention in the face of denials by both agencies that he ever had any involvement with them.
McBride also slated SA Police Service Assistant Commissioner Suiker Britz for his handling of the case during McBride’s incarceration in Mozambique. Soon after McBride’s arrest Britz visited Mozambique. On his return, after not having interviewed McBride, Britz made several statements to the press to the effect that on the evidence against McBride he saw in Mozambique, any South African court would”send McBride to prison for a long time.”